With the light hand of Maximilian Voloshin, the name of Cherubina de Gabriac was imprinted in the history of Silver Age poetry instantly and firmly - while the name of the one who participated in the creation of this chimera was crossed out and forgotten for many decades. Meanwhile, the life of Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva: poet, translator, playwright, seer and occultist is much more interesting and rich than the vivid biography of a fictional poetic ephemera, on whose behalf she wrote poetry for some time. How did Dmitrieva enter Russian poetry of the 20th century, who did she remain in it? How did it happen that Voloshin and Gumilyov almost killed each other because of a nondescript “plebeian lame woman”? How, finally, did the fate of Lily Dmitrieva turn out after the duel? This book is an attempt to reconstruct the real biography of the one known as Cherubina de Gabriac: the most famous hoax of the Silver Age and, in the words of A. Tolstoy, “the most fantastic and sad” figure in Russian literature.