Krychevsky was born in Lebedyn, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, to the family of a Jewish country doctor who converted to Orthodox Christianity and married a Ukrainian woman.

He was extremely popular among the artist-colleagues, faculty at the institute and the students, and no one betrayed his Jewish origins to the German authorities, saving him from the Babi Yar massacre.

Krychevsky was arrested by the NKVD as a collaborator, but his interrogations have elicited nothing that could incriminate him, so he was stripped of all his titles and honors and sent to exile to the village of Irpin near Kyiv where he died of starvation during the famine in 1947, despite the food help that was receiving from his student Tetyana Yablonska.

[2] In total, he produced close to a thousand works, including narrative compositions, portraits, landscapes, drawings.

It was formed under the influence of Gustav Klimt and Ferdinand Hodler and combined Secessionist aesthetic principles with folk and Icon sensibilities.

Krychevsky's modern touch to the pictures, like planar-linear rhythm and harmony of colors, enriched the paintings' classical interpretation.