Alexander Pushkin commissioned this portrait for his friend Sergey Sobolevsky shortly after his return from exile. Sobolevsky lived abroad from 1828 to 1833. When he returned to the Russian Empire, he found that a copy of the portrait had been placed into the frame, and the original had disappeared.
In the 1850s, Prince Mikhail Obolensky, director of the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saw the original portrait in an antique shop and bought it. Presently, the original is kept in the All-Russian Pushkin Museum, and this copy is on display in the Pushkin House. The Russian Museum conducted an examination of this portrait and it was established that most likely it was painted by an artist Viktor Smirnov, who completed it no later than 1833.
The poet is depicted with a signet ring on the thumb of his right hand. The ring has an inscription in Hebrew. This is Pushkin’s famous talisman ring that he glorified in the poem “Guard Me, My Talisman”. This ring was presented to the poet by Yelizaveta Vorontsova at parting when he left Odessa on the 1st of August, 1824. Pushkin believed in the miraculous power of stone. According to the critic Pavel Annenkov, the poet “due to a certain tendency to superstition, associated even his own talent with the power of the ring that was covered with some Kabbalah symbols and that he took great care of.”
The ring was a large twisted gold band with a large octagonal carnelian stone of a reddish or yellowish color. An inscription in Hebrew was carved on the stone,
