The battle between a pig and a donkey: оn the reattribution of the fable against Sumarokov from the literary war of the 1760s

He fable “The Pig in a Fox’s Skin” (1760) was attributed to F. I. Dmitriev-Mamonov in at least in two manuscripts of the eighteenth century. It was later reattributed to M. V. Lomonosov, mainly because this was seen as a response to A. S. Sumarokov’s fable “The Donkey in a Lion’s Skin” (1760) directed against Lomonosov. This article shows that this reattribution was mistaken. Based on the manuscript of Mamonov’s poem “Russia” (Poema Rossiia, 1773); on a letter newly attributed to Mamonov (dated May 11, 1770, to Moscow University); and on a previously known but incorrectly interpreted text (the preface to his translation of La Fontaine’s “Love of Psyche and Cupid”) we can reconstruct Mamonov’s language program and explain why he would have opposed Sumarokov in favor of Lomonosov in the literary conflict of the 1760s. The article also presents a heretofore-unpublished epigram from G.F. Müller’s papers concerning the same dispute that was overlooked by the first publishers of “The Pig in a Fox’s Skin.”