By contrast to the tremendous public impact of “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “Ammalat-Bek”, “Izmail-Bey” provoked hardly any reaction from its immediate readership. A product of Lermontov's adolescence, the poem was first published with the censor's deletions in 1843. The posthumous appearance conformed to a peculiarity of the author's career. Although a precocious talent who began writing in his teens, Lermontov published little verse before dying at the age of twenty-six in a duel in the Caucasus in 1841. He made his first big mark on the Russian literary scene when the novel A Hero of Our Time appeared the year before his death. The sole edition of verse prepared in his lifetime also came out in 1840. Marred by traits of juvenilia, “Izmail-Bey” was just one of many works never revised to meet mature Lermontov's high standards for publication.

The poem none the less rewards attention as Lermontov's earliest disavowal of Eurocentric ideology about civilizing the Caucasian Muslim tribes. “Izmail-Bey” does not grapple with the era's vexed questions of Russian national identity. However, Lermontov's awareness of Islamic culture was awakened by the study of oriental literature and philosophy in 1830–32 at Moscow University, where one of his professors was the Russian Arabist, Boldyrev. This exposure to the thought of ancient Arabia and Persia left the writer with a life-long affinity to eastern responses to the mystery of fate, as A Hero of Our Time would demonstrate. Even more significantly, like earlier romantics such as Somov and Kiukhelbeker, Lermontov developed a view of privileged Russian relation to the Islamic East's storehouse of cultural treasures.