Players enter through an intricate, animated painting, peopled by characters from Soviet-era children’s books. They follow quests in a trail of stories within stories. Meet a tsarina who has forgotten how to laugh; a cat without a tail; a half-woman-half-bird named Sirin; and the witch Baba Yaga, who famously lives deep in the forest, in a hut that stands on chicken legs.
Along the trail, gamers can read the original children’s tales and explore intricate art.
Launched in February, the narrative quest game Nobody Knows for Certain, created by new media artist Afrah Shafiq and available on gaming platform itch.io, is a millennial’s tribute and challenge to a bit of near forgotten history.
It draws on stories from the Cold War-era Russian books that were shipped over for Indian children from the 1960s until the collapse of USSR in 1991. The game uses elements from these tales to remind a new generation of this unique cultural exchange. But more intriguingly, it adds fresh elements to the mix, and uses these new elements to peel away layers of propaganda and explore how storytelling can be “a site of control and of subversion”, as Shafiq puts it.
In a fictional narrative created by the artist, iconic figures such as Baba Yaga and Sirin cross paths with new inventions such as the “unlaughing” tsarina and tailless cat, who represent outliers in a land fiercely committed to conformity.
“On the face of it, the original books were just stories for kids. But several of them painted a colourful picture of the Soviet Union as an ideal land, which it wasn’t. The study of the game is a larger study of the construction of the nation state vis-à-vis the idea of propaganda aimed at the conditioning of children,” says Shafiq, 34.
Enter a new realm
Nobody Knows for Certain was funded via a 2019 research fellowship with the Moscow-based Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which encourages initiatives that examine aspects of Russian culture from new perspectives. In February, phase two of the project received a VM Salgaocar Fellowship Grant from the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (the grant seeks to encourage creative projects that “provoke awareness of the vital role of art in shaping humanity”).
Shafiq, who grew up in a post-Soviet world, did not engage with the Russian children’s books as a child. When she first chanced upon them, in adulthood, the luscious art stayed with her. She joined Facebook communities set up by fans and collectors. She would eventually tour Maharashtra, Kerala and Delhi, meeting fans and photographing their collections.
But she also began to think about what it must have been like to be an Indian adult or child engaging with these works. One section of the game takes players into the world of a typical child reading these books in the Cold War era. Among other things, it points a gentle finger at fundamental contradictions. A fictional reader from Kerala, for instance, has a father who is enthused by Soviet ideals of the dignity of labour and vital role of every citizen in nation building, while his wife labours alone in the kitchen.
Today, in a time of an only-loosely-democratic Russia being led by Vladimir Putin into a war aimed at annexing Ukraine, the game seeks to encourage healthy scepticism on all sides.
The Russian atrocities in Ukraine seem like history repeating, Shafiq says. “The image of the USSR presented then, as a union of willing republics, was to some extent a false one. Several of these states viewed Russia as an occupier.” The game is a reminder to always question the stories one is told, she adds.
Drawing even
Amid the political statements and creative world-building, expect the art to take your breath away. Since the original books were part of a Russian soft power move, they were lavishly illustrated works. The game contains art from the books (now in the public domain), images received on request from museums, and original illustrations and comic panels by Shafiq.
Watch: Watch a clip from the game Nobody Knows for Certain
“To give the India part of the game a distinct look and feel, the illustrations are inspired by the iconic Tinkle comics. I wanted there to be a parallel visual story of these two worlds,” she says.
The original music and score, by musicians Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda, which varies from chirpy to mysterious to melancholic, effectively sets the tone in each scenario. “We researched folk music traditions in the Eastern Bloc and synthetically reproduced the sounds of traditional Russian instruments such as the duduk, a double-reed woodwind instrument, and the stringed balalaika. We wanted the music to transport the players to that world,” Mistry says.
Shafiq is now conducting research for phase two, which includes digging deeper into the lives of the translators who made these books accessible to children across India. “A lot of the questioning and critique [of the Soviet era] will play out more strongly in this second phase,” she says.
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