His mother Pelageya Vasilyevna Azarevicheva was a serf actress at Count Semyon Zorich Theatre, whom Yoakhim married when working with that troupe as decorator, in the early 1800s.

He was appearing regularly in plays by Alexander Ostrovsky (Rispolozhensky in It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves, Gradoboyev in An Ardent Heart, Kuritsyn in Live Not as You Would Like To, etc.

), mostly as merchants and senior servants, habitually resorting to humorous improvisations playing havoc with the original text, much to the amusement of the appreciative audiences.

Konstantin Stanislavski remembered: "Having entered the stage, he immediately headed for the audiences, pronounced his greetings, received the ovation and only then addressed the task of playing his part.

According to one critic, 'For fifty years Zhivokoni played himself and nobody else but did this in such a way that the audiences never had a single dull moment in the course of this half a century,'" the theatre historian M. Vasilevskaya wrote.