Russian historical joke from Peter I to Alexander III

The Goncura brothers once wrote that there was a petty shop of history. Small stories about funny, unexpected, paradoxical cases and incidents, about historical faces or fictional heroes have long been a certificate of times and morals.
In Russia, a joke as an independent literary genre has become especially popular in the second half of the 18th century, and reached its prosperity in the Pushkin era when its laws, traditions, and the repertoire of plots developed. As storytellers and collectors of jokes, A.S. Pushkin, P.A. Vyazemsky, F.I. Tyutchev, N.V. Gogol, N.V. Puppeteer and others.
In this book, jokes have been collected from the time of Peter I to the era of Alexander III. Among the characters are the jester of Balakirev, poets Sumarokov and Lomonosov, Count Rumyantsev, Prince Potemkin, commander Suvorov and many others. The texts that the reader will find is a kind of chronicle of tastes, prejudices and preferences, lively, cheerful, colorful, in its best samples, delivering truly aesthetic pleasure