In the middle 1790s Krylov made a manuscript collection of his
lyrical poems, which opened with a series of eight spiritual odes – paraphrases of Psalms, numbered by the author («The Ode First selected from the Psalm...» etc.), but not in the order of their numbering in the Psalter (17, 71, 14, 96, 37, 93, 51, 87). In this
article we are talking about the history of the publication of these poems, their literary and biographical context (in particular on Sumarokov’s paraphrases of Psalms and on relevant for Krylov an example of Nikolay Nikolev, which was published in 1795 volume of his spiritual poems), as well as some of the ideas and motives of the cycle and its composition, obviously had a certain meaning for Krylov.