[1] Born in Ivanteyevka in the Moscow Governorate of the Russian Empire, as a writer, Gorbunov started out in 1853, as a contributor of stories and sketches to Moskvityanin, and later Otechestvennye Zapiski.

In the course of forty years he played 54 parts, most of them in plays by Alexander Ostrovsky (most memorably, Kudryash in The Storm, Pyotr in The Forest and Afonya in Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All), his friend for whom he occasionally worked as a secretary.

[1] In the 1850s Gorbunov started to introduce the audiences to his own original repertoire of dramatized short stories under the heading of Scenes from the People's Life (Сцены из народного быта), satirizing all strata of the Russian society, particularly petty state officials.

They earned him praise from Dostoyevsky, who found there "...a lot of astute observations and the deep understanding of the nature of Russian people.

The humour of his stories "spread all through the country in the form of proverbs, and folk jokes," according to Alexey Pleshcheyev.