After graduating the Moscow University in 1866 he joined a Saint Petersburg district court as a lawyer and became famous after achieving the acquittal of Marfa Volokhova, a peasant woman falsely accused of her husband's murder.

Accused on this account of "maintaining criminal contacts with revolutionaries," in September of that year Urusov was arrested in Moscow and deported to Finland where he stayed in exile until 1876.

[5] Banned from practice in court, Urusov turned to journalism and became a popular literary and theatre critic, writing under the pseudonym Alexander Ivanov.

He was a friend of Ivan Turgenev, regularly corresponded with Anton Chekhov, was considered an authority on the French poetry and literature (Baudelaire and Flaubert in particular) and later exerted the strong influence upon the circle of the young Russian symbolists.

In his essays and articles Urusov (who described himself as "a liberal") was a fierce critic of social injustice in Russia, propagating the same principles he upheld in court.