The poet’s famous signet ring was made in the Crimea
My colleague Serhiy Makhun writes in the article “Archoligarch Count Mikhail Vorontsov” (The Day, April 22, 2003, No. 14), “Contemporaries called Vorontsova ‘one of the most attractive women of our time’ in admiration of her grace and geniality. According to many researchers, the poet and the countess fell in love...”
Many who study Alexander Pushkin’s life know that it is Countess Yelizaveta Vorontsova who presented the poet with the famous finger ring, which in the first place was one of a pair (the other one remaining with her) and, secondly (which very few researchers know!), was made in Juft- Kale, the Crimea, by Karaite (non- rabbinical Jewish) jewelers. Here I offer the history of these rings.
When the Crimean Khanate was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783, the law-abiding Karaites preferred to stay behind at their ancestral home Juft-Kale (Chufut-Kale). Attending a Bakhchysarai reception in 1787, Catherine II asked Karaite Benjamin-Agha, a former minister in the Khan’s court, how he fared without the Khan. He asked her to let him go to Turkey, to which the empress said, “No matter how well you feed a wolf, it will still escape from you into the forests.”
Moreover, as Shahin-Girei did not go to Turkey, the overwhelming majority of Karaites also decided to stay behind in the Crimea. A few years later the Khan still went to Taman and then to Istanbul. The ruler of the Ottoman Sublime Porte allowed him to settle at Rhodes, where he was killed on the Khan’s order, admittedly for siding with Russia.
The Crimean Karaite Jews, who wholeheartedly served the Khan, took his murder by the Ottoman Turks as a personal offense. This fact was the main reason why they fought on the Russian Empire’s side in the Crimean War, with many of them courageously defending Sevastopol. The Russian tsars liked the Karaites for their unusual scholarship (suffice it to recall Peter I’s chancellor Shafirov). Catherine II issued an ukase granting them substantial privileges. When Emperor Alexander I came to Yevpatoriya in 1818, he put up at the house of Karaite suzerain (Gakhan) Haji Babovych and even visited his harem (see the watercolor), where he admired the concubines therein. In 1838 Nicholas I issued an ukase on the Karaite clergy, and Alexander III often received the last Gakhan Shapshal. Nicholas II, visiting Yevpatoriya in 1916, stayed at the country retreat of Mayor Duvan, a Karaite, for six days.
The Karaites were well known in the Crimea as jewelers. We know the story of Pushkin’s ring. As is known, the poet was proud of his ring and called it his lucky charm. It was a bloodstone signet ring with which Pushkin sealed many of his letters and manuscripts. For example, he made even five impressions under the poem Talisman. Pushkin treasured and never parted with the ring. After the duel, the dying poet willed it to Vladimir Zhukovsky, his friend and “vanquished teacher.” When Zhukovsky died, his son Pavel handed the ring, as a precious relic, to writer Ivan Turgenev who in turn willed that it be given after his death to Leo Tolstoy and begged that the latter in turn bequeath it to a worthy upholder of Pushkin’s traditions in literature.
However, Turgenev’s heir Pauline Viardot sent the ring to the Alexander Lyceum’s Pushkin Museum, where it is still being kept. Unfortunately, the ring was stolen, along with other valuable museum objects, in the spring of 1917. This is — so far — the end of the story. It is quite possible that the Karaite signet ring was not melted down as precious metal scrap and will still be traced somewhere. For it is unlikely that there was a third copy of this rarest jewel precious not so much for the cost of its metal as for its history (further you will see that according to legend there was a pair such of rings).
What was left in the museum is the case, the stone’s mold, and its impressions in sealing wax and beeswax. This must be enough to help identify the find should humanity ever happen to see this relic again. In addition, there is a description of the ring by a visitor to the 1899 Pushkin exhibition in Saint Petersburg, “This is a big spiral-shaped gold ring with reddish gem and a carved-out Oriental inscription. Such gems inscribed with a Koranic verse or a Muslim prayer often occur in the East even now...”
Pushkin’s oeuvres abound in the images of precisely this ring. As is known, on the eve of Pushkin’s departure from Odesa for Mikhailovskoye, Countess Vorontsova presented him with her gold medallion portrait and a lucky charm, a gold ring with an octagonal bloodstone and a mysterious carved inscription. Pushkin wrote in 1825, “In a secret cave, on the day I was banished, as I read the sweet Koran, an angel of comfort suddenly flew in, bringing me a talisman...” As soon as 1827 he was much more frank, “In the harem, where the Muslim lazes for days on end, a magic woman fondled and gave me a talisman...” A similar signet ring remained with the countess: she used it to seal letters to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye, asking him to burn them immediately after reading them. We find confirmation to this in Pushkin’s poem, The Burnt Letter, “Adieu, the letter of love! Farewell to thee, for this is her command...” There also is the following line, “The melted wax is seething, with no impression of the true signet ring...” The image of the ring Vorontsova presented also occurs in the brilliant poems, Talisman; Keep Me Safe, My Talisman; In a Secret Cave; and The Burnt Letter, the height of love lyrics. It is with this ring that Pushkin is depicted on the portraits by Tropinin and Mauser. As time went by, Pushkin began to ascribe magical properties to the ring, believing that the inscription was cabalistic and could work miracles.
As it turned out, the story of this ring, albeit little known for obvious reasons, has nevertheless been unraveled by historians. Back in 1933, well-known Turkologist Szyszman published a French-language article “Le talisman de Pouchkine” in the Paris-based Bulletin d’etudes Karaites. Its Russian translation was printed in Vestnik Russkogo fonda kultury.
It turned out that the ring inscription was deciphered in 1888 by D. Khvolson, a well-known Russian Oriental scholar, doctor of philosophy, professor of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg University, and author of the scholarly translation of the Bible into Russian. He concluded that the abbreviated inscription was made precisely in Karaite italics and literally meant the following, “Simha, son of the holy sage Joseph, blessed be his memory.” According to Khvolson and Szyszman, the text (the word “sage” in the traditional Crimean Karaite usage, a unique way of writing letters and figures) makes it possible to precisely identify the ring’s time and place of manufacture: the turn of the nineteenth century, the Crimea, Juft-Kale. The Crimea was then part of the New Russia Territory. Mikhail Vorontsov, the territory’s governor general from 1823, owned a number of estates on the peninsula. The Vorontsov couple was known to be on good terms with the Karaites. It is from them that the countess received these rings as a gift (or as payment for the services done).
Incidentally, Elizabeth Bezekawiczene writes that Fevchuk, who studied Pushkin’s links with the Crimea, published the picture of the ring in a paper on Pushkin’s personal property 15 years before Szyszman. Karaite philologist and researcher S. Firkovich also read the inscription by means of this picture. His study was published in the Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian languages in a Trakai district newspaper (Trakai hosts one of the largest Karaite colonies). The Karaites are a religious and ethnic group descending from a Turkic tribe (who claim to be descended from the Khazars who might have founded Kyiv — Ed.). They dwelled in the Crimean mountains from the ninth century (when the Khazars were defeated by a Slavic-Viking coalition called the Rus’, some kind of coalition of Vikings {Varangians} with the local ancestors of what became the Ukrainians and Belarusians who later converted to Christianity and colonized an area of Finno-Ugric pagans that became known as Russia — Ed.). In the late fifteenth century, a part of the Karaite people emigrated to Lithuania, Kyiv, Volyn, and Halychyna. Incidentally, the grand dukes of Lithuania pointed out the Karaites’ incorruptibility and loyalty to the oath of allegiance.
The fourth volume of The Karaite Encyclopedia also carries a watercolor illustration we copy here, “Karaite Gakhan Haji-Agha-Babovych Presenting Countess Vorontsova with a Talisman.” The Day’s readers might find it interesting to compare the portraits of Vorontsova in our No. 14 issue and here: the same poise of the head, the same hair, necklace, and face — obvious resemblance and almost complete identity. And although it is clear that the ring is of Karaite origin, there is no information at all about the master’s life or his other works. Nor is there any documented evidence that the ring was presented (sold or exchanged) to the countess by precisely Haji- Babovych — this is just one of the many guesses of the researchers of Karaite life, who have traced the most probable way of the ring from the person who made it to Vorontsova.
The later destiny of Pushkin’s ring is known very well, while that of Vorontsova’s one is not known at all and probably never will be. Haji Babovych (1788-1855) was Russia’s first official gakhan of the Crimean Karaites and mayor of Yevpatoriya. His efforts made it possible to erect a kenasa (cathedral) in Yevpatoriya, restore the khan’s palace in Bakhchysarai, publish Karaite literature, and lay out showpiece gardens in the Crimea. Representing the interests of Karaites, Babovych met with Russian tsars and top officials, including Vorontsov, maintaining relations with the highest Christian and Muslim clergy. Together with a platoon of Karaite cavalrymen, he escorted Nicholas I to Bakhchysarai and Juft-Kale. Babovych’s palace in Yevpatoriya, where Alexander I and the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz stayed, still stands, albeit in a wretched condition.
