Kositskaya was born in the village of Zhdanovka nearby
Nizhny Novgorod to a family of Russian
serf peasants. "We were part of the household of a master whom people were calling the Dog. We, as children, were scared even by the sound of his name, for he was for us the embodiment of horror. I was born in his house which stood on land soaked with peasant blood and tears," she wrote in her posthumously published memoirs. At the age of fourteen she found work in Nizhny Novgorod as a housemaid for a merchant woman, named Dolganova, who paid for her primary education. It was in Dolganova's house that Kositskaya debuted as an amateur actress, discovering she'd got a fine singing voice too. In April 1844, against her mother's will, Kositskaya joined the Nizhny Theater where she was engaged in roles of peasant girls and servant maids and also sang in operas by
Weber and
Verstovsky. She came to Moscow with a view to becoming an opera star but found herself first in a drama school, then, through
Mikhail Shchepkin's recommendation, in Maly Theatre. Here Kositskaya married actor Ivan Nikulin, who was her second husband. The marriage proved to be an unhappy one. The revival of Kositskaya-Nikulina's career started when for her benefice she chose
Alexander Ostrovsky's sixth play (and the first to receive the permission to be produced at the Imperial Theatres)
Stay in Your Own Sled. Her triumph as Dunya Rusakova paved for her the way for a series of successful appearances in Ostrovsky's plays at Maly. She reached the peak of her career as Katerina in
The Storm (1859), setting a template in what is now regarded as a Russian theatre classic. By this time Kositskaya and Ostrovsky were intimate friends, and it was later suggested that many details of her own youth, spent on the
Volga banks, have been used by the playwright in the tragedy's plotline. In 1860s Kositskaya started to appear in comedies, although critics praised her as Desdemona in
Othello as well. Her last part was that of Lizaveta in
Aleksei Pisemsky's
A Bitter Fate (1863). After two years of close relationship, Ostrovsky proposed to Kositskaya and was refused. She fell instead for a merchant's son Sokolov, one of her young followers, who soon squandered all of her money and left her. Shock and humiliation apparently hastened Kositskaya's physical demise. She died on 17 September 1868, in
Moscow and was buried at the
Vagankovo Cemetery. Ten years later her memoirs called
Notes (Zapiski) were published by
Russkaya Starina (1878, book XXI), to much critical acclaim. == References ==