It was about her that Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy wrote the famous lines: The cheerful queen was Elizabeth... And indeed, during no other reign in Russia did they like to have fun so much: to organize fun and masquerades, balls and performances. But the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna (1741-1761) is also twenty years of Russian history, which included the opening of Moscow University and the founding of the Academy of Arts, the victories of Russian weapons in the Seven Years’ War and the public whipping of recent secular beauties who shone at court balls, “the matter "Saltychikha and the murders of Vanka Cain... The book, written by the famous St. Petersburg historian Evgeniy Viktorovich Anisimov, is essentially the first biography in our country of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the beloved daughter of Peter the Great.