Princess Evdokia Golitsyna was descended from the ancient Izmaylov family on her paternal side and from the famous collector and philanthropist, Prince Nikolay Yusupov, on her mother’s side. She was orphaned early and brought up by her relatives. Well-educated and with a serious interest in mathematics, she was married by the will of Emperor Paul I to Prince Sergei Golitsyn in 1799. He was a rather ordinary man, much older than her. The Golitsyn family then went abroad after the wedding, with the prince residing in Dresden and the princess in Paris. There, she became friends with Madame Récamier, a trendsetter and socialite. Legend has it that it was Récamier who introduced a fortune-teller to Golitsyna. She predicted that the princess would die in her sleep, and from that time, Golitsyna began hosting social receptions at nighttime, instead of sleeping.

In 1801, shortly after the death of Paul I, the Golitsyn family returned to Russia. Although the princess was separated from her husband, she did not seek a divorce. In St. Petersburg, she became known as the “Princess of the Night”: she continued hosting social gatherings at nighttime at her mansion on Millionnaya Street. Golitsyna’s salon was frequented by notable figures such as Pyotr Vyazemsky, Nikolay Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, and the Turgenev brothers, among others. Prince Vyazemsky described her as follows,

In 1817, Alexander Pushkin dedicated two poems, “An Inexperienced Lover of Foreign Lands…” and “A Simple Pupil of Nature…”, to Princess Golitsyna. She interceded with Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna for Pushkin, in order to mitigate his fate when he faced the threat of southern exile. The portrait in the collection of the Literary Museum, which is an enlarged version or the artist’s replica of the original held in the State Tretyakov Gallery, was created in the early 1810s by the painter and academician Alexei Yegorov. The portrait depicts the princess in the guise of an ancient Roman vestal.