The article analyzes dialectisms that are components of proverbs and sayings recorded in the “Ancient collections of Russian proverbs, sayings, riddles, etc. from the 17th to the 19th century” compiled by P. K. Simoni (1899). This collection, reproduced from the manuscript of the Petrine time, reflects the elements of colloquial and book speech of this era. Such proverbs feature a lot of lexical, phonetic, morphological and syntactic dialectisms. The author of the article compares the data of P. K. Simoni’s collection with the paremiological data of the “Great Dictionary of Russian Proverbs” issued by V. M. Mokienko. T. G. Nikitina and E. K. Nikolaeva, paying special attention to lexical dialectisms. The latter are given a semantic and areal characteristic based on the data of the Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects (SRNG) and other dialect dictionaries.