He graduated from the Kiev Theological Academy in 1905, and within half a year he was teaching history and geography at the Russian-Arab Seminary in Nazareth.
He attempted to obtain permission to conduct excavations in the Moscow Kremlin; however, the Tsarist government did not allow him to.
In 1914, while exploring the archives of Pärnu, Estonia, Stelletskii found “Dabelov’s Catalog of The Library of Ivan the Terrible.” Further studies were cut short because of World War I.
After the start of the Russian Civil War, Stelletskii became a Professor of the Ukrainian University, where he taught a course in Archaeology.
Despite suffering from hunger dystrophy, he prepared a manuscript of his book “Dead in Moscow Cache”, which was published several years later, in 1993.