The poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky built a dizzying career for his time. As an illegitimate son of the Tula, Kaluga and Oryol landowner Afanasy Bunin, he became the literature teacher of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, and then the mentor of the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander, the future Emperor Alexander II.

Zhukovsky was summoned to court by chance, when the Russian language teacher and philologist Grigory Glinka fell ill. He was supposed to teach Russian to the wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the Prussian Princess Friederike Luise Charlotte Wilhelmine. Suffering from his illness, Glinka recommended his friend Vasily Zhukovsky to take his place.

As a teacher, Zhukovsky accompanied the Grand Duchess on her travels abroad. In 1825, Vasily Zhukovsky became the mentor of Grand Duke Alexander. The poet Anton Delvig wrote to Pushkin about this news,

It was this briefcase that the poet carried to classes with the Grand Duchess and the Tsesarevich. The engraved inscription on the brass plate “Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky” and the initials “L.D.” indicate that the briefcase contained papers that belonged not only to the poet, but also to an unknown person with the initials “L.D.”. Apparently, the initials refer to Zhukovsky’s mother, Yelizaveta Dementievna Turchaninova, who was called Lizaveta Dementievna by her close-ones. She was Turkish and her birth name was Salkha. She was captured in 1774, when the Russian army stormed the Turkish fortress of Bender. Salkha was brought “as a gift” to the poet’s father, the Tula landowner Afanasy Ivanovich Bunin, and was christened Yelizaveta. Among the papers of Yelizaveta Dementievna, the manuscript department of the Pushkin House keeps her passport, “A decree from the Moscow Provincial Government on the free residence in Russia of Y.D. Turchaninova (Salkha)”. In addition, the museum houses letters from Zhukovsky to his mother.