Born a serf, she wove her way into the highest ranks of the intellengista, breaching the inner circles of a new class of society forming in the capitals of eastern Europe. As a teenager, two of her stories were published by the leading journals alongside Tolstoy & Dostoevsky. By twenty, then a student of famed physiologist Dr. Ivan Sechenov, she published her first scientific work. The threat of women and their ideas was enough to shut down the universities in Russia occupied Europe, Zurich was a safe haven for a women under increasing surveillance harassment.

She was an unofficial student in 1865 and in 1867 she asked permission to take the official finishing exam and be treated as an official student. They said yes and the rest is history.