Her father was Vassili Ivanovitch Chizn, an artillery officer and local official, and her mother was Elisaveta Alexandrovna Toumskaya.

She graduated from the Institute for Young Ladies in Warsaw, and was training to be a teacher when she started a relationship with Anton Denikin.

[1] Denikina and her family went into exile in 1920, living eventually in France and Belgium, where she helped her husband write his memoirs.

Xenia Denikina became an American citizen in 1951, returned to France in 1971, and died at Louviers in 1973, aged 80 years.

[8][9] Her papers, and her husband's, are in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University Libraries.