Tropinin's Portrait of Pushkin and the Posthumous Portrait by Karl Masur

Tropinin's portrait of Pushkin and the posthumous portrait by Karl Masur. In both, the poet wears a ring with a red stone on his thumb. Around this ring, one of Pushkin's favourite, a great many legends have clustered ever since it first appeared. They begin with the question of whether the signet was a love gift from Elizaveta Vorontsova or merely a pleasant souvenir brought from the Crimea as a present for a friend. Pushkin himself is believed to have endowed the ring with mystical properties, though the same is said of other rings of the poet's. Nevertheless, besides conjecture, the history of this ring contains plenty of genuine mysteries. It is said that Pushkin wrote of this very ring in "The Talisman", "The Burned Letter", "In the Mysterious Cave" and "Keep Me, My Talisman..". It is known that before his death Pushkin gave the ring to Vasily Zhukovsky /allegedly with some sacred injunction/, who passed it to his son Pavel; Pavel gave the ring in the 1880s to Turgenev, who wished to bequeath it to Tolstoy, as in his view the greatest Russian man of letters; after Turgenev's death Viardot gave the ring to a museum