 She loved to sing, and after two years in a religious chorus, she became a professional singer in Kiev, where she married Edmund Plewicki, a Polish dancer.Soon, they moved to Moscow, where she began singing in the well-known Yar restaurant, whose specialty was gypsy bands with beautiful female singers.While on tour, at a concert in 1909, at the Nizhny Novgorod fair, she was heard by the great tenor Leonid Sobinov.