Varvara Alekseevna Wadbolskaya was born on May 20, 1817, in Moscow, Russian Empire (Moscow, Russian Federation). She came from an old noble family of Obolensky. She was the eldest daughter of Prince Alexei Nikolayevich Obolensky who served as a lieutenant and Princess Varvara Sergeevna Golitsyna.
Varvara Alekseevna began to engage in writing in adulthood thanks to her acquaintance with Stepan Slavutinsky (for some time he was close to the Obolensky family in Moscow). Wadbolskaya’s literary debut is the novel The Narrow Way (1858), written under the pseudonym Krinitsky M. - the name of the main character of the novel. It received a number of rather restrained responses, but the reviewers approved the main idea of the novel, the main character of which is a young princess who sacrificed her personal happiness for the sake of peace and love of her relatives.
In July-August 1861 Alexei Pisemsky’s Bible for Reading published Wadbolsky’s novel Notes of a Bachelor, which was an attempt to introduce a new character - the nobleman who decided to change idle laziness to serve the people on the eve of the abolition of serfdom. The idea and characters of the novel, reliable pictures of the life of the social circuit (to which Wadbolskaya herself belonged), as well as the irony in the characterization of the protagonist gave her fiction a topical sound.
In 1864 she published the novel Barren flower in the publishing house of the magazine Entertainment. It tells about modern "superfluous person" who is very similar to Oblomov in his "thoughts and speech" and who experiences his spiritual fall. Varvara Alekseevna also performed in the genre of the ethnographic essay, for example, Village Traditions which tells about the Poltava region, where her husband’s family estate was located.
As a translator from German, she together with Slavutinsky released Essays on History and Folk Tales by Alexander Grube, A General History of Literature by Johann Scherr (1862), and A Textbook of General History by Ezer (1864). She delivered a sharp article Polish women in the current uprising condemning the Polish uprising of 1863-1864 and calling the rebels on humility.
Varvara Alekseevna was married to Prince Alexei Alexandrovich Wadbolsky (1815-1853), headquarters captain, major general.
