This paper is about Russian proverbs, made a science by Vladimir Ivanovič Dal’. He understood the realities of his time as few others did, always investigating and appreciating the manifold expressions of the life of the Russian people. But first and foremost, Vladimir Ivanovič Dal’ amended obvious misrepresentations, restoring or reconstructing the original forms using linguistic or purely dialectological analysis – which he was able to do because he was the first to classify Russian dialects, in 1852.