Was Semen Gamaleia a poet, and what is “Anacreontic poems, S. I. G.”?

Abstract

This paper is a study of the poem that was published in the Magazin svobodno-kamen'shchicheskoi, a Masonic journal, in 1784. As a result of the study I reject the attribution of this poem to Semen Gamaleia and clarify the issue of the date of Gamaleia's birth. Certain lines of the poem are compared with the prosaic utterances of Gamaleia in his correspondence.