[1] Her mother, who gave language lessons, was the first cousin of Arkady Vladimirovich Tyrkov and the niece of Sophia Perovskaya, two of the members of Narodnaya Volya, who had attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

[2] In the 1901–1902 season, she performed as Solokha and the female innkeeper in Tchaikovsky's opera Vakula the Smith at the Saint Petersburg People's Hall.

[1][4] Though she wanted to continue with music studies, Antarova had to work to be able to pay for lessons with Ippolitus Petrovich Pryanishnikov [ru] at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

She took a job as a teacher in the Nikolaevskaya Railway's Alexandrovsky foundry school, riding the train an hour each way to teach and back for her singing lessons.

[2] Antarova performed as the mezzo-soprano soloist for a year at the Mariinsky, before being hired as a replacement for another singer who worked at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

[4] She also performed in concerts, with solos in works such as Petite messe solennelle by Gioachino Rossini and Vier ernste Gesänge by Johannes Brahms.

[4] Some of her most noted roles were as Lel in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden; Vanya in A Life for the Tsar by Glinka; Floshildy in Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung; and as the Countess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, among many others.

[2] Because she attended Theosophical Society meetings and was open about her explorations of mysticism and the occult, Antarova was surveilled constantly, though she escaped arrest because Stalin admired her voice.