He was the great-grandson of Tadeusz Kościuszko[1] and father of Boris Artzybasheff, who emigrated to the United States and became famous as an illustrator.

Artsybashev was born in khutor Dubroslavivka, Okhtyrka county, Kharkov Governorate (currently Sumy Oblast, Ukraine).

He wrote his first important work of fiction, the story Pasha Tumanov in 1901, but was unable to publish it until 1905 due to its being banned by the censor.

In one notorious scene, a girl tries to wash embarrassing white stains off her dress after sexual intercourse with Sanin, an incident omitted from the 1914 English version.

The novel was written under the influence of the philosophy of Max Stirner, and was meant to expound the principles of Individualist anarchism.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and to a certain extent Anton Chekhov, played almost as great a part, and Victor Hugo and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were constantly before my eyes.

He was an irreconcilable enemy of the Bolshevik regime, and Soviet critics dubbed the novels of his followers saninstvo and artsybashevchina (both terms are considered derogatory).