007.1. Empress Elizaveta Petrovna / Елизавета Петровна
According to Golicyn (109-110) , the Empress Elizabeth, known in Russian as Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-1761), who reigned from 1741 until her death in 1761, wrote three brief verses and part of an acrostic. Most literary historians have regarded this output as insufficient evidence that she was a bonafide writer and it has failed to secure her a place in literary history.[1] Nonetheless, even these few literary fragments – if they are really hers – arguably make Elizabeth a more prominent cultural actor than many of her peers: if she wrote less than her great aunt, Natal'ja Alekseevna , she perhaps wrote more than Sof'ja Alekseevna , or Peter the Great's semi-illiterate wife, Catherine I (author of a handful of letters), or the Empress Anna Ioannovna . But did she really write these texts or is Elizabeth's authorship merely, as Amanda Ewington (23) has suggested, the stuff of legends? Let's look at these verses in the next few posts. The first verse that Golic