Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Varvara Zarudnaya met as fellow students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and married in 1883. In Tiflis, they helped organize a music school, and in 1917 they established the Tchaikovsky Vocal Studio at the Moscow Conservatory.
Ippolitov-Ivanov dedicated his opera Asya (1900) and the romance Alsatian Ballad to Zarudnaya.
