“As We Say in Our Village”: The Linguistic Space in “Grief Like a Stray Dog”

We are Rayonist Studio. On January 29, 2025, our game “Grief Like a Stray Dog” (“А горюшко вслед собакою…”) will be released on Steam. To celebrate this milestone, we’d like to share how we created the linguistic atmosphere of our visual novel.

The game was originally written in Russian, a choice that shaped its ambiance and
dialogues. Unfortunately, when translating into other languages, including English, many nuances are lost or difficult to convey. Translation inevitably simplifies certain subtleties that feel natural and profound in the original language. Nevertheless, we want to share the process behind creating this linguistic atmosphere with our English-speaking audience.

Exploring Languages: A Journey Through Time

In our daily lives, we often encounter the need to understand unfamiliar languages — be it our native tongue, foreign languages, mathematical symbols, or programming languages. These and other systems of signs help us make sense of the world and its people. While working on “Grief Like a Stray Dog,” one of our goals was to partially immerse players in the everyday life and linguistic space of the mid-20th century.

Writers, screenwriters, and directors creating works about the past often face similar challenges. Some focus on visual elements—costumes, architecture, and household items—to transport audiences to a bygone era. Others adapt the speech of their characters, styling it to reflect historical realities, which creates a sense of linguistic “time travel.” However, forgoing language stylization can also be an intentional artistic choice. For example, if a work’s genre allows for a tone akin to Sorokin’s “Telluria” or deliberate “linguistic flash-forwards” like in Evgeny Vodolazkin’s “Laurus” – a novel that blends medieval and modern Russian.

(Konchalovsky’s “The Story of Asya Klyachina, Who Loved But Did Not Marry”, 1967)

The events of “Grief Like a Stray Dog” unfold during World War II in a small village in Russia’s Tver region. The characters are based on real-life witnesses of the war: combatants, civilians, and children born during the catastrophe. With access to individuals who preserved the language of that time, we relied heavily on personal interactions. We gathered facts, recorded conversations, and repeatedly listened to the memories of our relatives. Without this genuine and prolonged contact with people who grew up in villages, it would have been much harder to authentically replicate their dialogues.

Our grandparents not only shared language, jokes, folktales, lullabies, and songs but also taught us to recognize authentic rural culture. In those who continued to use regional speech patterns (such as okanje or akanje) even after moving to cities, we found remnants of a grand peasant past.

Additionally, we analyzed various written sources, ethnographic expedition reports, and academic articles on early 20th-century oral speech. In crafting the game’s dialogues, we sought harmony between modern conversational Russian and the dialects of central Russian villages. This balance was crucial to avoid overwhelming players with regionalisms, which could make the text tiring and difficult to understand, even for native Russian speakers.

(Konchalovsky’s “The Story of Asya Klyachina, Who Loved But Did Not Marry”, 1967)

Literature and Cinema: Sources of Inspiration

Revisiting literary works was a vital part of our approach. For example, reading Andrei Platonov, who masterfully created unique linguistic constructs to describe the world, inspired us to treat language as a malleable material. Platonov’s example demonstrated that beyond conventional linguistic norms lies not chaos but a sea of new meanings and possibilities. In addition to Platonov, we studied works by Nikolai Leskov, Pavel Karpov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose texts reveal the richness of folk speech in their own ways.

“Comrades!” Safronov began to articulate the general feeling. “A factual inhabitant of socialism lies before us in a state of unconsciousness. From the radio and other cultural material we hear the party line, but nothing we can touch. But here rests the substance of creation and the goal of the party —a little human being, destined to become the universal element!”
(Andrei Platonov, “The Foundation Pit”)

(Vasily Shukshin’s “Kalina Krasnaya”, 1974)

(Vladimir Khotinenko’s “The Muslim”, 1995)

We also examined relevant imagery from Soviet cinema. One key example was Andrei Konchalovsky’s “The Story of Asya Klyachina, Who Loved But Did Not Marry” (1967). Filmed in the village of Kadnitsy in the Gorky region, the movie featured only a few professional actors, with the rest of the cast being local villagers. The film captured documentary-style monologues and dialogues about life and war. Synchronous sound recording preserved natural intonations and speech rhythms, providing valuable examples of phrases, phonetic nuances, and syntactic patterns that informed our dialogue writing.

Other influential films included Vasily Shukshin’s “Kalina Krasnaya” (1974), Vladimir Menshov’s “Love and Doves” (1985), Werner Herzog’s “Bells from the Deep” (1993), and Vladimir Khotinenko’s “The Muslim” (1995). These works not only inspired character development and imagery but also served as sources for specific speech constructions, interjections, and elements that brought our characters to life.

(Konchalovsky’s «Siberiade», 1978)

Folk Songs and Music

Folk songs also provided ideas and imagery for scenes, characters, and mood. From the recordings of the M.E. Pyatnitsky Choir and Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble to the works of A. Matochkin and S. Starostin, music profoundly influenced “Grief Like a Stray Dog”. The song “White Day” (lyrics by Arseny Tarkovsky), performed by the group “Petr Valentinovich” became the game’s soundtrack and played a central role in a key scene.

Final Thoughts

The rural language in our game is not a complete reconstruction and does not claim absolute authenticity. With “Grief Like a Stray Dog” we aimed to write and sketch an ode to the universe called “Russian village”. You can evaluate our attempt when the game launches on January 29, 2025.

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