Yelizaveta Tolstaya came from an old noble Simbirsk family. The 31-year-old Goncharov first met her in Saint Petersburg in 1843, when she was 16 years old. He left a note in his new acquaintance’s memory book, where he wished her “a bright and carefree future”.

 
Goncharov and Tolstaya met again twelve years later, in 1855. Although Yelizaveta Tolstaya was already 28 years old, she still was not married. Tolstaya soon left Saint Petersburg for Moscow, but shortly before that she accompanied Nikolay Maykov to the famous photographer Sergey Levitsky’s studio: the artist asked to have her picture taken, for he needed it to paint a portrait of her. Unfortunately, the negative was accidentally destroyed by the photographer’s apprentice, therefore there could be no copies made of the photo. Goncharov kept the only copy and would later lend it to Maykov for a while so that he could paint the promised portrait.

After leaving for Moscow, Yelizaveta Tolstaya began to correspond with Ivan Goncharov. The writer sent her chapters from his novel “Pour et contre” (For and Against), where he spoke of his own love through the words of an imaginary friend and confessed,