He was educated at the church school in Okhtyrka and at the theological seminary in Kharkov, in the third year he was expelled for participating in the Narodnik movement (in the organization of Black Repartition) and distributing banned literature, then arrested and exiled to his native village under police supervision.

[1] In 1885 he went to Kharkov, where he worked as a proofreader in the newspaper "Yuzhny Krai", in the autumn of the same year he was mobilized into the army and sent to serve in the Turkestan Military District.

[1] Hrabovsky was one of the representatives of Ukrainian revolutionary democratic poetry of the late 19th-century and a follower of the tradition of Taras Shevchenko.

[4] Hrabovsky is also the author of numerous translations into Ukrainian of works of world classics such as Lord Byron, Goethe, Sándor Petőfi, Robert Burns, etc, and Russian poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, Derzhavin etc.)

In 1888, Hrabovsky, in the Moscow transit prison (Butyrka), met a former teacher and a member of the Narodnaya Volya, Nadezhda Malaksiano (Sigida), who was also convicted of revolutionary activity.