Nadezhda Vasilyevna Pleviskaya, born Vinnikova, was born on September 17, 1879, in the village of Vinnikovo, Kursk province, and passed away on October 1, 1940, in Rennes, Brittany. She was a Russian singer with a mezzo-soprano voice, performing Russian folk songs and romances. According to legend, Emperor Nicholas II referred to her as the "Kursk Nightingale." Nadya Vinnikova grew up in a peasant family where hard work and piety prevailed. One day, accidentally attending a circus performance in Kursk, she decided to become a circus performer and was soon accepted into the troupe.

Later, Nadya became a maid in a wealthy merchant family, and after moving to Kyiv, she became a chorister in the chapel of Alexandra Vladimirovna Lipkina. There, she soon began to perform solo parts. Despite her lack of education and inability to read music, the peasant girl possessed an extraordinary voice and perfect pitch, which allowed her to effortlessly perform complex solo pieces and become a professional singer.

A turning point in her life came in 1909 when she was heard by Leonid Sobinov at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair. With his support, she performed at the Moscow Conservatory and befriended Shalyapin and many actors from the Art Theatre. She performed multiple times at the Court, and Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, impressed by her singing, gifted Pleviskaya a diamond brooch in the shape of a beetle. Nicholas II was her most famous admirer and, according to witnesses, often bowed his head and cried while listening to her.

With the onset of World War I, Nadezhda Pleviskaya, along with her second husband, Lieutenant Shangin of the Cuirassier Regiment, went to the front, where she worked as a nurse in a hospital.

After the revolution, she emigrated to Germany and France, where her popularity was so great that there was talk of "Pleviskamania." In 1930, she began collaborating with the NKVD. In 1937, she was arrested and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor for her involvement in the kidnapping of the head of the Russian All-Military Union, White General Yevgeny Miller, from Paris, along with her husband. French President Albert Lebrun refused to grant her clemency. Pleviskaya died in a women's prison in Rennes in the autumn of 1940.