Prince A. M. Belosel’skii’s play Olinka, or Primal Love is an important text for understanding the movements that took place in Russian literature at the end of the reign of Catherine II and at the beginning of the reign of Paul I. However, the anecdote told by the famous memoirist Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemskii, depicting the scandal that followed the presentation of the opera, has long overshadowed analysis of this text and obscured the circumstances of its creation and staging. In this article, an attempt is made to verify the memoirist’s narration, to establish its inaccuracies and make assumptions concerning what actually happened and when at the Stolypin home theater in Moscow.