He could not receive education consistently due to difficult living conditions during First World War, the revolution, and the post-war chaos.

Bahrianyi entered the Kyiv Art Institute but did not graduate due to material distress and the prejudiced attitude of the management.

They called him Mazepian (a Russian derogatory term for Ukrainians after Ivan Mazepa, similar to modern Banderites), which may have been one of the reasons for his joining the OUN in the future.

[citation needed] During the Civil War and later, in the early 1920s, he was involved in Soviet social and political work, but in 1925 he left Komsomol.

In 1929 he published a collection of poems, "Ave Maria", which was almost immediately banned by censorship and removed from the book trade.

Bahrianyi was a member of the Kyiv Association of Young Writers, MARS (an abbreviation for Workshop of Revolutionary Word) where he met such writers as Valerian Pidmohylny, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Hryhory Kosynka, Teodosiy Osmachko, and others who were criticized and repressed by official Soviet authorities.

After Okhtyrka was overrun by the German army at the onset of World War II, Bahrianyi joined the Ukrainian nationalist underground organization and later relocated to Galicia.

Bahrianyi published his novel Tygrolovy (translated as Tiger Trappers or The Hunters and the Hunted in English) and the poem Huliaipole in 1944.

He headed the Ukrainian National Council's executive committee and also performed the duties of the Deputy President of the UNR in exile.

In 1963 the Democratic Union of Ukrainian Youth based in Chicago started action to support awarding Ivan Bahrianyi with the Nobel Prize.

In 1992, Ivan Bahrianyi posthumously received the national Shevchenko Prize (Ukrainian: Шевченківська премія) for his novels Tyhrolovy and Sad Hetsymanskyi.