After graduating from the Second St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, he joined the Moscow Guard Regiment, but was forced to retire in 1867 due to serious head injury he received in Poland in 1863 while taking part in the suppression of the January Uprising.

He joined the Military History Society, then started to attend the literary salons of Anna Filosofova and Sofya Tolstaya, became friends with Nikolai Leskov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, visited Leo Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana estate.

A conservative Slavophile,[2] Navrotsky's agenda as a publicist included the critique of nihilism, materialism, 'western Socialism', all kinds of radicalism, but also bureaucratic inefficiency, so as to highlight the role of the Tsar as a zealous reformer, eager to get as close as possible to his own people.

The Conversion of Lithuania (Крещение Литвы), written in 1874 and first published in 1879 in Russkaya Retch, featured in Volume 3 of the Works by A. Navrotsky (1900), but continued to be edited by the author and only in 1902 came out in its final version.

This decade saw the publication of the short stories collection Waves of Life (Волны жизни, 1894) as well as two novels, Under the Blows of Fate (Под ударами судьбы, 1898) and To Each Their Own (Каждому своё, 1899).

Of Navrotsky's later work the most successful was the tragedy in verse The Tsar Ioann III Vasilyevich which received a special diploma at the Pushkin Prize Award ceremony in 1901.