Vasilije Živković was born in the town of Pančevo in Banat on 31 January 1819,[1] where his father, a soldier of the Serbian Military Frontier, was then a resident.

Živković represented the constituents of Pančevo and the area at the Karlovci Sabor during an important period and, from 1864 on, was performing diplomatic duties at the time when the affairs of the Serbs in Banat attracted unusual amounts of attention throughout Europe.

In an award-winning autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor (published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York and London, 1924), Serbian-American physicist Mihajlo Pupin remembered hearing one of many Petar II Petrović Njegoš's lyrical verses recited by Vasilije Živković, "The verse from Njegoš I obtained from a Serbian poet, who was an archpriest, a protoyeray, and who was my religious teacher in Pančevo.

Živković began to contribute to the Pančevo reviews as early as 1838 , and his verses found their way into most of the Serbian literary periodicals favorable to the Romantic poets and writers.

Having begun, however, to write under the influence of Lukijan Musicki and the contemporary leadership of German and world literature at the same time, he retained the classical tradition, though he adopted innovations of Goethe and Schiller.