Her mother was the Baroness Weimar and, through her mother's similar descent from Afro-Russian aristocrat Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Lidia was a distant relation of Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin.

She did attend the Saint Petersburg women's gymnasium for a short time, but was expelled for being "obstinate".

[2] In 1893, she separated from her husband and fled to Rome, where she met the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Her short novel Tridsat'-tri uroda (Thirty-Three Abominations) was one of the few works of its day to openly discuss lesbianism.

In 1913, Ivanov remarried Lydia's daughter, Vera, from her marriage with Shvarsalon.