Born of parents who were petty tradesmen of serf descent, Tikhonov trained as a clerk, graduating from the Petersburg School of Commerce in 1911.

He began writing poetry early; his first collection, Orda (The Horde, 1922), "shows startling maturity" and "contains most of the few short poems which have made him famous.

His cycle of war stories Voennye koni (Military Horses, 1927) is "perceptive and well constructed.

In 1944 he became chair of the Union of Soviet Writers, but was dismissed by Joseph Stalin in 1946 for being too tolerant of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova.

[4] However, he remained an important figure in Soviet literary circles, and he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1957.