The article is an introduction to the publication of fragments of the manuscript by V.E. Valdenberg Commentary to the Ode Volnost' (Liberty); it is dedicated to some problems of history of legal philosophy, interrelations between the ideas of law and freedom in the West European and Russian traditions. Those studied were summarized in Valdenberg's works about compositions by A.S. Pushkin. On the base of the textual analyses, Valdenberg fulfilled a study of the terms law and freedom in the Russian culture of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries.