Grief like a stray dog · published
The desire to tell a story about a war that ended 80 years ago always presents creators with numerous questions and challenges. How does one reflect feelings and impressions, carefully weaving them into a cohesive narrative? We know the stories of Tanya Savicheva and Anne Frank, of Lyonya Golikov and Calvin Graham, and of hundreds of thousands of other children touched by war. The art of the 20th and 21st centuries has grappled with their stories in books, films, comics, and games. Works like Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962), Son of the Regiment (Vasily Pronin, 1946), Destiny of a Man (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959), Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019), and Anna's War (Aleksey Fedorchenko, 2018) easily come to mind.
In the game "Grief like a stray dog" World War II is shown through the eyes of a little girl postman. Her village is behind the front lines, but fear, hunger, and death constantly penetrate their small world — through the letters the girl has to deliver due to her mother's illness.
We faced a choice between a documentary prototype for the main character or a more abstract central storyline, yet one filled with authentic micro-stories of secondary characters. In the end, the prototypes for the young postman became the grandmother of one of the game's creators, as well as the lyrical heroine from Tatyana Chernovskaya's "Poems about a Postwoman." However, the fates, life sketches, and wartime situations for most of the secondary characters were drawn from family stories, wartime tales, letters from great-grandfathers, and several open sources.
If the experiences of the episodic characters were developed based on available audio and video materials, living memory, etc., then what means could be used to convey the collective image of the heroine? The answer was found in Russian folktales. When immersing ourselves in a virtual world, we have to control the game's main characters and, moreover, identify with them. The path of any hero is quite archaic at its core — even when facing ordinary, everyday trials in life, we often compare ourselves and the people around us to well-known archetypes, searching for similar stories in books, cinema, etc. Hence, it seemed justified to combine the motifs of folk tales, where the hero overcomes difficulties, with the story of a simple girl during the war. We turned to researchers and collectors of fairy tales who have clearly described the structures inherent in the hero's journey from beginning to end.
Alexander Afanasyev's book Russian Fairy Tales became our desktop reference during the game's creation. It easily and widely opens the door to the world of fairy tales.
Key images from magical plots included:
"Grief" from the eponymous tale in Afanasyev's collection, as well as "Grief" and "The Lay of Grief" from Konstantin Balmont's collection The Firebird: The Slav's Pipe (1907).
"Koschei" / "Baba Yaga" and the motif of the hero leaving their home — from tales like "The Wood Demon," "The Swan Geese," and "Marya Morevna."
Abstract, non-specific images of animals — "The Death of the Cockerel," "The Hen," "The Crane and the Heron."
It's impossible to list all the titles, just as not all references from fairy tales had a direct influence on the game, its plotlines, etc. For us, it was more important to fill the terrifying world of war, death notices, and commendation orders with recognizable childhood experiences.
Another clue was the philosophy and research of the Russian fairy tale by Evgeny Trubetskoy: if the "other kingdom" in the fairy tale is not the another world, but a different way of perception, then for the heroine, letters can become such an "other kingdom" — a space where death is side by side with hope, and horror — with touching humanity.
And what if war is not just a historical period, but something more? Could it be an equally abstract, yet all-consuming evil — like Koschei, "immortal" in his cruelty? Not an event, but a faceless entity that strangles the village with cold, hunger, and tragic notices?
The work of philosopher Evgeny Trubetskoy, The Other Kingdom and its Seekers in the Russian Folk Tale, served as an important impulse for us from the very beginning. Quotes from this book not only formed the basis of an early concept document but also became a kind of compass, helping us navigate the space of folk myth.
“From beginning to end, the fairy tale is a child of our sorrow and grief. This is told by the countless images of the fairy tale; this is sung by the folk song as well; Grief is the stimulus of all magical transformations.“
“The psychology of Russian folk sorrow is reflected with extraordinary brightness and imagery in the Russian fairy tale. A poor man returns from a rich name-day party where he was passed over with the food, and he tries to strike up a song, to appear cheerful to people. He sings alone, but two voices are heard; he stops and asks: 'Is that you, Grief, helping me sing?' Grief replied: 'Yes, master, it is I helping.' 'Well, Grief, let's go together.' 'Let's go, master, I will not leave you now.' And Grief leads the master from trouble to trouble, from tavern to tavern...“
— The Other Kingdom and its Seekers in the Russian Folk Tale by Trubetskoy E.N.
The narrative of folk tales and epics is not always clear to the average reader or listener. Although the logic of plot development in screenwriting, literature, and games directly inherits folklore traditions, the clear explanations of fairy tales came to conventional Hollywood from philology, folklore studies, comparative methods, and structuralism in linguistics. Therefore, we could not ignore the works Morphology of the Folktale and The Historical Roots of the Wondertale by Vladimir Propp. The first volume of his research is devoted to finding universal structures in the fairy tale, which the author reveals by analyzing the functions of characters. According to Propp, the motives, age, gender, and attributes of characters do not affect the plot but are the background of the real structures laid down by actions and deeds that influence the course of the tale. Such research can be useful and a serious aid in overcoming difficulties when creating any plot.
The following combination proved valuable to us: the scientific rigor of Propp and the philosophical depth of Trubetskoy, which allows one to see in a fairy tale not a scheme, but a living reflection of the human spirit.
“The Russian fairy tale is very feminine. It is tuned not to struggle, not to a break, but to a very subtle emotional perception, to the ability to feel the world as a whole. The mediator between this world and the other is often Baba Yaga. She carries out the initiation, showing the way to that very other world, that very beyond. In most Russian fairy tales, the woman does everything for the man and guides him.“
“... In the Russian fairy tale, the path to this goal is guided not so much by the husband's feat and valor, as by his wife's wisdom. It is characteristic that wisdom is personified not by a male, but predominantly by a feminine image. It is the feminine principle that holds the central guiding role here.“
— The Other Kingdom and its Seekers in the Russian Folk Tale by Trubetskoy E.N.
While working on the script, we consciously abandoned the use of ready-made screenwriting techniques and dramatic constructs. It was important to switch off the calculating dramatist within ourselves and allow the material — the letters, memories, folk images — to determine the form and structure of the narrative itself. This organic approach is especially relevant when dealing with a child's perception of war — immediate, fragmentary, yet saturated with profound symbols.
During the creation process, we also drew on plots and characters from the works of 20th-century children's writers, as well as from Russian and foreign animation. In general, reading and rereading children's literature and folk text corpora is necessary and useful in any storytelling process — whether you are toiling over a game, shooting a music video, or writing an academic paper. Fairy tales introduce us not only to skillfully constructed narrative logic, to brave and foolish, sometimes strange and occasionally frightening characters, but also teach us to understand another, folk-mythological language, and to switch social and historical registers.
Ultimately, "Grief like a stray dog" is an attempt to find that very "different way of seeing reality" that Trubetskoy wrote about. Not a documentary reconstruction, not an allegory, but precisely a space where war appears simultaneously as a concrete historical tragedy and as a timeless myth experienced by a child — with their fears, hopes, and an amazing ability to find light even in the darkest of fairy tales.
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We also published a text sharing our approach to building the linguistic space for "Grief like a stray dog".