Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova-Rosset was a Russian Imperial court lady-in-waiting and a memoirist. “Resplendent with youth, beauty, remarkable abilities and wit, she was a little idol for all who knew her, and was, so to speak, au courant of all the best that was published in Russian, treasured her friendship with Zhukovsky and maintained friendly relations with Pushkin until the fatal duel,” the poet Yakov Polonsky wrote about her.

Many Russian and foreign artists admired the image of Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, and many portraits of her were painted. She was described in poetry and prose. Ivan Turgenev portrayed her as Lasunskaya in the novel “Rudin”, Mikhail Lermontov as Minskaya in the novella “Stoss”, and Nikolai Gogol as Chagranova in the second volume of “Dead Souls”. Friendship with Gogol played a huge role in the life of Smirnova-Rosset, whom he called “the pearl of all women.” They met in Nice in the winter of 1843–1844 and quickly became close friends.

Contemporaries noted the exceptional spiritual closeness between Nikolai Gogol and Smirnova-Rosset, which was rare for the writer. The daughter of writer Sergey Aksakov, Vera, in a letter to her brother in 1850, described her impressions of Nikolai Gogol and Alexandra Rosset,

Before her marriage, Alexandra Rosset served as a lady-in-waiting for two empresses, Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna. She was often invited to the homes of prominent figures, such as the Karamzin family, where she encountered some of the most well-known and brilliant individuals of the era.

After marrying Pushkin’s friend Nikolai Smirnov, who later became governor of Kaluga and St. Petersburg, she hosted a salon in her house, inviting Pushkin himself, Alexander Turgenev, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Vladimir Odoyevsky, Alexey Sobolevsky, Ivan Myatlev, Lermontov, Gogol and many others. Almost all prominent poets of the first half of the 19th century dedicated poems to her.