His father, Hryhoriy Oleksiiovych Fitilyov, had noble origins but was, as Khvylovy himself wrote, "a highly careless person" and a drunkard.

Khvylovy shared his father's interest in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s, sympathised with the ideology of the Narodniks, the former Russian populists of that era, and was equally inspired by the works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Vissarion Belinsky and Dmitry Pisarev.

[1] He studied at an elementary school in the village of Kolontayev, where his mother, Yelyzaveta Ivanivna (nee Tarasenko), was a teacher, then continued his studies at the Okhtyr Male Gymnasium, which he was forced to leave due to his participation in a so-called Ukrainian revolutionary circle, and later at the Bogoduhiv Gymnasium, from which he was expelled for his connections with socialists during the revolutionary unrest.

As the head of a volunteer unit of Free Cossacks, which he organized at the end of 1918 in the Kharkiv region, he fought against the Hetmans, the Germans, the White Army forces led by Mikhail Drozdovsky, and the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic or "UNR", which he had originally supported, but which subsequently ordered his arrest.

That same year, he married a teacher, Kateryna Gashchenko, who bore him a daughter, Iraida, but the marriage quickly fell apart due to Khvylovy's infidelity.

He worked as a locksmith and married Yulia Umantseva, who had a daughter from her first marriage, Lyubov, whom Khvylovy accepted as his own and affectionately called Lyubistka.

In the same year, he involved himself with writers connected to Vasyl Blakytny and the paper Visti VUTsVK (news from All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee).

"[5] He was just as critical of the Russian proletarian literature of the time, which he thought had substituted bureaucratic slogans and "all-Union Philistinism" for a genuine revolutionary attitude.

[6] Khvylovy was likewise dismissive of contemporary Ukrainian literature, which he condemned for lacking the "Faustian activist attitude" of an "inquisitive human spirit" characteristic of European civilization, but instead demonstrated "cultural epigonism" and "servile psychology," which produced "sluggish artists capable only of repeating what has already been done before, of aping".

Khvylovy tried to meet the challenge by creating another organization, Prolitfront, but it made so many concessions to the proletarian ethos and partisan ideology embodied by VUSPP that it ultimately lost any semblance of independence.

Khvylovy also changed his style to conform to the new standards of socialist realism, joining VUSPP and producing propaganda pieces for the Soviet regime.

But the climate for any form of Ukrainian literature became grim, as Soviet authorities, in the midst of the Holodomor, required unqualified loyalty to the regime and eliminated those who had opposed it in the past.

In April 1933 the secret police arrested Mykhailo Yalovy – former head of VAPLITE, closest companion and ally of Khvylovy.

In the second series, Dumky proty techyi (Thoughts against the Current), which appeared in Kul’tura i pobut in November–December 1925 and separately in 1926, Khvylovy further developed his argument against the "cult of epigonism".

Leaving aside poetry, from which the writer soon turned to prose, the work of M. Khvylovy following G. A. Kostyuk can be divided into three periods: 1921–1924 – the time of the experiment and the search, to which the plotless romantic, lyrical, everyday satirical studies and the stories “Life” (Zhyttya), “Puss in Boots” (Kit u Chobotyakh), “On the Deaf Road” (Na Hluhim Shlyakhu) belong, “Editor Kark” (Redaktor Kark), “Blue Leaf Fall” (Synii Lystopad), “Pig” (Svynia), “Arabesques” (Arabesky), the short story “I” and others.

The last stage of his work includes “Hunting Stories” (Myslyvsky Opovidannya; the writer was an avid hunter), “From the Laboratory” (3 laborers), “Future Miners” (Maybutny Shakhtari), etc.