Annenkov was born into a wealthy landowning family in Moscow.

In the late 1830s he met Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Ivan Turgenev, with whom he became lifelong friends.

[1] His letters from Europe appeared in the journal Notes of the Fatherland.

He was an important proponent of aestheticism along with his friend and fellow critic Alexander Druzhinin and with Vasily Botkin.

[1] He is best known now for his memoirs The Extraordinary Decade (1880), the title of which has become attached to the Russian literary generation coming up in the 1830s and 1840s.