Junge was born in Saint Petersburg in 1843 to Count Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy.

Countess Tolstaya hosted a liberal salon in Saint Petersburg.

[2] After the professor settled into retirement, the couple bought a large tract of land at the Crimean coast.

They later sold parcels of land for villa sites, giving birth to the resort village of Koktebel.

Her reminiscences about Nicholas I of Russia were used by Leo Tolstoy for his novella Hadji Murat.