Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a noble family of moderate means and spent his early years in Semyonov, a small provincial town.

Melnikov was about to embark upon the academic career at the university when for some kind of wrongdoing (the nature of which remains unknown) he was deported to Perm to start work there as a teacher of history and statistics.

[2] As a writer, Melnikov debuted in 1839 in Otechestvennye Zapiski with the series of sketches called From Tambov Governorate to Siberia: The Traveller's Notes.

But his first stab at fiction, a short story "About Who Epidor Perfilievich Was and Which Preparation Were Taken for his Birthday", published by Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1840, proved to be a failure; critics dismissed it as a poor imitation of Gogol.

In 1847 he became the Governor of Nizhny Novgorod's special envoy, then moved to the Russian Interior Ministry to supervise the issues dealing with the Raskol.

In his special "Report on the Current Situation in Raskol" (1854) Melnikov argued that the low level of morality among the Orthodox church officials was to blame.

[1] Following his close friend Vladimir Dal's advice, Melnikov resumed writing and in 1852 published the short story "Krasilnikovy" in Moskvityanin.

Maxim Gorky called On the Hills "the glorious poem of Russia" and urged young authors to take lessons from Melnikov-Pechersky and Nikolai Leskov, learning from them "the clarity and richness of language.