Anatoly, owner of the moderately Socialist Kharkiv newspaper UTRO (Morning), went through divorce proceedings that resulted in Varvara winning custody of his two-year-old son, her nephew, Vladimir Anatolevich Jmoudsky. Vladimir and Irina were raised as brother and sister. Varvara remarried a prominent lawyer, N. S. Karinsky (1873–1948), from Moscow, who was residing in Kharkiv. With his law practice burgeoning, the Karinsky family of four moved to Moscow in 1916, to a spacious apartment that Varvara had purchased. Karinsky continued to practice criminal and political law and gained fame and prestige throughout the Russian Empire. Varvara, meanwhile, became totally engrossed in the arts and hosted her famous salon every night after the theater or ballet. She developed her own form of painting applying pieces of colored silk gauze to photographs and drawings. Her first subjects were ballet scenes. After much tearing apart and redoing, she exhibited about 12 of her works in a prominent Moscow gallery and was quite successful both financially and critically. Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. In May, 1917, under the Provisional Government, N.S. Karinsky was appointed Prosecutor of the St. Petersburg court of Justice. He and Varvara resided in the capital several months, leaving the children in the care of their governess in Moscow. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the Civil War moving between Kharkov and Crimea. Karinsky who held posts off and on as prosecutor under the White government of the South joined them sporadically. As 1920 began, Varvara and the children were living in Yalta. In February Karinsky was appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior of the South Russian Government with headquarters in Novorossiysk. With the fall of Crimea to the Red forces in October of that year, Karinsky was a marked man. Unable to find his family, several of Varvara's sisters and brothers forced him to leave Crimea with them by ship, assuring him that Varvara would soon follow. But Varvara had decided to remain in the "New Russia.” Even as Karinsky made his way from Constantinople to New York, Varvara made her way back to Moscow leaving the children in Yalta for close to a year under the care of the faithful governess. In 1921, Varvara met and married Vladimir Mamontov, son of one of Moscow's wealthiest pre-revolutionary industrialists. Having lost everything, Mamontov remained with nothing except his charm, beautiful piano