There is this famous saying that lives on as a meme in the Continental Europe and in America in discussions when Soviet legacy and history is analyzed. The saying goes “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” ( I am sure people have heard of it) nobody knows exactly who said but it is a collective saying that can succinctly describe the lives of Soviet citizens in their relationship with the State.
HBO series Chernobyl perfectly describes this relationship and in digging deeper I want to explore the topic of “lies” and their effect on society. In the Western traditional culture we have one word that describes lying, lying is a form of dishonesty (which is forbidden as a sin in the scripture) and in ex-Soviet space which includes Eastern Europe and Central Asia (which for some reason is always overlooked in the media) lying had two forms. In many Slavic languages there is “lozh” which is translated as lying as in our Western understanding of the above word and then there is “vranye” which is also lying but has a more nuanced and deeper meaning that both parties of that activity understand and they partake in it willingly. Again I would direct my audience to see Chernobyl by HBO to understand that phenomena and they did do their research on that subject.
“Vranye” (system lie; I do not even know how to describe it) permeates the societies of ex-Soviet states and to a lesser degree satellite states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and even as far as Vietnam. “Vranye” is the type of a lie in which individual understands that it this is a lie and yet collectively partake in it. Hard to go against the grain, and it is the glue that binds many collectivist nations even today. Modern Russia still to this day has this vestige which expands and contracts with time (it is now expanding), and it seeps through the whole society. One has to look no further than the Ukrainian conflict and the Russian society and this “vranye” on how it affects the whole populace. Modern Russia is still a collectivist system, nobody trusts nobody, and even absurd claims are believable by vast majority of people.
So why this theme and concept? It is important to me and maybe to many others. It is in the air, in the news, and thus it is important to understand different societies. I can feel the demand for it in the web and in discussions. I can look some texts and novels that deal with it or have it in them. One that comes to mind is a famous Day Without Lying by Viktoria Tokareva which is a novel that deals about contemporary life in the 1960’s Moscow. I am not sure what it is going to be, I am inclined to do a Diagram software to design and show different webs of lies and how they affected protagonist and what other choices they may have had. You can create diagrams and even games regarding lies and truth since it is a binary but I want to look into more complex situations which deals exactly with “Vranye”. I am not sure about traditional paper since it is a DH course and I want to explore tools that I have not used. Miro is a good choice or diagrams.net also a good choice as both are free and open access.
If I understand you, you have identified a specific-yet-widespread socio-cultural phenomenon–the untranslatable vranye–and want to explore its representation in fiction using some kind of data visualization. I think that’s a splendid idea, though the way you want to develop it is still a bit hazy for me, both because the concept is unfamiliar and because I’m not familiar with the texts that play with or model the concept. My first thought is that you’ll need to work hard to define the object precisely. In your proposal, you seem to slide between the two senses of “lying” in ways that muddy the waters. You define vranye as something that everyone knows to be a lie but acts “as if” it were true, but you then point out that in places where vranye circulates, “nobody trusts nobody, and even absurd claims are believable by vast majority of people,” which makes it sound as if the “vast majority” actually believe the vranye on the one hand, despite not trusting anyone. I think these paradoxes are resolvable–in the US we’ve seen the specter of a Trumpism in which exorbitant, obvious lying strangely establishes the deeper truthfulness of the one lying, because at least he’s “honest” about his dishonesty–but you’ll have to do some careful work to establish what you mean. Interestingly, vranye names something very close to the game in the world of “play theory” or the drama in Aristotelian ideas of theater: in both cases, audiences willingly suspend themselves in an ambiance of “as if,” pretending as if something were real for a particular span of time in a particular space (the audience, the covers of a book, the chalk lines of a soccer field) even though they know it to be “make believe.” My question is how you can best represent this structure: do you want to show the movement and circulation of lies using network analysis (and extensive work has been done on this topic in social media to study disinformation)? Or the receptivity of characters to “lies”? How would you represent the paradoxical fact of “believing” something that you also know to be false? I hope these questions are productive. You might consider something like Gephi to assist in this project, and I certainly recommend that you consult with the DHs Fellow, Filipa Calado [email protected] or schedule via this link.
Finally, take a look at this essay, which is a stone-cold classic in the philosophical literature on truth and lying!