Thursday, December 25, 2008

Signatures

Russian signatures are a form of folk art. Nobody simply signs his name. The signature has to be a form of Chinese calligraphy. Artemiy Lebedev asked his blog’s visitors to publish their passports’ signatures (of the cops who issued them the passports).

Some examples:


(The first time I see a signature with arrows — not to mention a spiral pin. “One can state safely”, says Levedev, “that the head of 2nd Moscow Police department was schizophrenic.”)

An arrow and a star:



And some samples from his readers:



42.91 КБ



















45.06 КБ

The main themes seem to be round signatures in Chinese-character style and repetitive lines symptomatic of orbitofrontal cortical damage (or obsessive-compulsive disorder).

2 comments:

le7 said...

Russians are interesting. Got to give you that.

Anarchist Chossid said...

To be fair, these are also Ukrainians (and, possibly, Byelorussians) and a German.

My signature is somewhat flourishy but nowhere near any of the samples (being a Jew, I don’t have one of those Russian names with two prefixes and three suffixes; I do, of course, have a patronymic — although right now it’s just an initial “V”, which some people think is a Roman numeral).