An evening on Tverskaya

Tverskaya can probably be considered the main street of Moscow. We are lucky enough to live on it, and tonight I met Lorina after work (after 9pm for both of us!) and we walked home up Tverskaya, with breaks for dinner, book shopping, and grocery shopping along the way. We saw a lot of graffiti:


A young couple gets cozy near a utility box which sports the tag "Mne" repeatedly. "Mne" is the dative case of "I" (as in "me, myself, and I"), so it is used in constructions like "give it to me," or "Dai Mne," which happens to be the title of a much-hyped book book by young Russian writer Irina Denezhkina - the recent English translation was titled Give Me, although I would have translated it as Give It to Me. Maybe that's why I'm not a professional translator. But I digress. In the graffiti context, Mne might just be an abbreviation for some 3-word phrase. KGM, for example (shown in an earlier post) actually stands for "Krasim Gorod Moskva," or "We Paint the City of Moscow." This scene is from the corner of Kamergersky Lane & Tverskaya, 9:14pm.


Tags - Waste, Na Vostok (this loosely translates as "Eastward" or "Toward the Orient"), and an illegible one - on a theater kiosk on Tverskaya (yes, "Cats" has made it to Russia - it's even being performed in Russian), 10:06pm.


Ornate but illegible tag ("The [something]") on the shutter of a closed kiosk in the pedestrian underpass by the book store at Tverskaya 8, 11:18pm.


Zachem tag on the other side of the same kiosk in the same underpass, 11:18pm.


Well-placed graffiti on the Stardogs stand (formerly a "Stop-top" stand, if you haven't been in Moscow in awhile - they rebranded all of them last year), across Tverskaya from the book store, 11:19pm.


A graffiti writer who goes by the handle "Waste" has helpfully labeled this trash can for English-speaking visitors to Moscow, on Tverskaya just toward the center from Pushkin Sq., 11:38pm.


Various graffiti, including "Mne" on the door to a while-you-wait key shop, Maly Palashevsky Lane just off Tverskaya, 11:43pm. Yes, that is an obscene graffito right there in the middle. Apologies to English-speakers who are offended. As for the other tags, "Ham" (or perhaps "Nam," depending on whether you think the tagger was using the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet) is one I've seen around and have some photos of, but BiF is one I hadn't seen before this evening.


FTM ("For The Masses"?) stencil, Maly Palashevsky Lane just of Tverskaya, 11:45pm.