The article was authored by Tatiana Karpova, a Doctor of Art History, and Lidia Gladkova, Head of the Department of Scientific Expertise of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

[10][11] In October 2011, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that experts from the State Tretyakov Gallery were working on the funds of the Museum of Don Cossacks in the city of Novocherkassk to determine the authenticity of the painting Crucifixus by Nikolai Ge.

Moscow experts told the newspaper's correspondent that until 2011 Russian art historians had not recognised Crucifixus as the work of Nikolai Ge.

On the 180th anniversary of his birth, and the international scientific conference that accompanied it, the correspondence between the museum, as well as another photograph of the painting were discovered in the archive of Natalia Zograf, a Soviet art historian who curated the exhibition of Nikolai Ge in 1970-1971.

Voronina, deputy director of the museum for the scientific part, wrote to Zograf (with the punctuation of the original preserved), as follows: How and when it [the painting "Crucifixion"] ended up in our museum—no one knows.

I would really ask you to let me know in any case.The letter was accompanied by a copy of a reply from the Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, dated 7 May 1964, signed by the head of the painting department, L. F. Galich.

In her written response, the art historian stated that, based on the provided photograph, the painting in question does not appear to be the work of Ge.

She presented two arguments to support this assertion: firstly, that Ge did not address the theme of the crucifixion in the 1880s and created a markedly different representation of Christ in the 1890s.

To the 180th anniversary of his birth, together with members of the Expertise Department of the State Tretyakov Gallery (Lidia Gladkova, Tatiana Rustamova and Vladimir Voronov), undertook an analysis of the painting during a visit to Novocherkassk.

An analysis of the infrared radiation spectrum revealed a multitude of alterations on the painting, predominantly pertaining to the positioning of the figure of Jesus Christ.

[9] The composition of the painting is similar to that of Ge's drawing of the Crucifixion of Jesus, which is part of the collection of Christoph Bohlmann and is currently held by the State Tretyakov Gallery.

[20][7] The authors explain the stylistic differences with the work of Nikolai Ge, which are present yet unidentified in the collective articles of 2012 and 2014, by the unusual purpose of the canvas.

The authors of the article hypothesise that this sample may be a painting by the French artist Léon Bonnat from 1874, which is held in the Petit Palais Museum in Paris.

[6][7] The pre-war documentation of the Museum of Don Cossacks and the materials of the Novocherkassk city archive, which could have provided insight into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Nikolai Ge's painting, have not survived.

A review of the correspondence of Nikolai Ge, along with the memoirs of his contemporaries, reveals no direct references to the history of creation or the existence of the canvas entitled Crucifixus from the collection of the Museum of Don Cossacks.

[23][16] There is also a description of one of the variants of the Crucifixus created by Nikolai Ge in 1884, which, according to the authors of the articles, is comparable in some aspects to the Novocherkassk canvas.

The description belongs to the Russian watercolourist Ekaterina Junge: "On one visit I saw his almost completely finished painting Crucifixus [in the text of the original without inverted commas].

[25] In their 2014 article, the authors highlight the distinctive characteristics of the landscape depicted in the painting, including the dark night with the glow of sunset, the smoothness of the sea and the moonlight over the rocky shore.

"[25] Lubov Petrunina, a candidate of philosophy and senior researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery, in her article "Nikolai Ge's exhibition 'What is Truth?'

Sholokhov's letter was archived and remained unexamined until preparations for an exhibition of Nikolai Ge's paintings in Moscow in 2011-2012 prompted a re-examination of the material.

[27] The researchers of the painting observed that the canvas has already been the subject of mass media publications[28][25] and, in accordance with the hypothesis of Zinaida Korotkova, it will subsequently be exhibited not only in the Russian Federation but also abroad.

[29][28][25] In March 2012, the Rostov newspaper Nashe Vremya published an article on the painting in connection with a demonstration of the Crucifixus at the Regional Museum of Fine Arts.

[30] In 2016, Nikolai Ge's painting was the focal point of the temporary exhibition, Faces of Holy Faith and Love, held at the Museum of Don Cossacks.

Articles pertaining to this topic were published in a number of prominent central and regional print media outlets, including Rossiyskaya Gazeta,[32] Moskovskij Komsomolets,[33] Komsomolskaya Pravda[12] and Argumenty i Fakty.

[34] The article in Moskovsky Komsomolets contains excerpts from interviews with Evgenia Svitliva, deputy director of the Novocherkassk Museum of Scientific Work, Tatiana Karpova, Doctor of Art History, and Victoria Naumenko, the chief curator of the Museum of Don Cossacks, who provide insights into the history of the discovery of the painting by Nikolai Ge, which were not included in the scientific publications devoted to it.

In particular, it has been reported that Polina Chernyshyova, the daughter of the artist Nikolai Chernyshyov, extended an invitation to the researchers preparing the exhibition in Moscow to get acquainted with a photograph of Ge's studio on the farm Ivanovskoye near Rostov-on-Don, where he lived from 1876 to 1894.

In the course of examining the documents contained in this folder, Tatyana Karpova came across a letter from the director of the Museum of Don Cossacks to Chernyshyov, which was dated 17 April 1961.

[33] The article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta is based on an interview conducted by a correspondent with Lidia Gladkova, the head of the scientific expertise department at the State Tretyakov Gallery.

[15] The author of the article in Our Time, the journalist Marina Kaminskaya, formulated two main versions of the painting's appearance based on the opinions of researchers.

The journalist herself assumed that the artist intended the painting for one of the Catholic churches in Ukraine, as "from the age of 45, Nicholas Ge lived and worked on an estate in Chernihivshchyna.