One of the reasons for the original statue's celebrity as 'the muse of Tsarskoye Selo' was its connection with the writer Alexander Pushkin, who stayed there in 1831 and had been inspired to write the poem "The statue at Tsarskoye Selo".
Story 28, "Of what happened to a woman called Truhana", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.