Literary salons were a common event at her home while she was growing up.At the age of sixteen, shortly after her father's death, she was married to Vasily Ivanovich Kireyevsky (1773-1812), from an old noble family, who had served as a cavalry captain and a judge.

Following her husband's death from typhus, she and her children went to live with an aunt, Yekaterina Afanasievna Protasova (1770-1848), the sister-in-law of poet Vasily Zhukovsky.

By the mid-1830s their home, informally known as the "Republic at the Red Gate [ru]", had become a major center of Moscow's cultural life.

She was also an active participant in public life, helping her son Ivan publish his magazine, The European [ru], and protesting on behalf of the philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, who was censored and declared insane.

In 1873, her son Nikolai was elected head of the nobility in the Belyovsky District, and she began spending her winters in Belyov.