[1][2] Viktor's family moved from Saint Petersburg to Warsaw in 1898,[2] where later he would encounter the best of world musical classics while listening to the performance of musicians such as Fritz Kreisler, Ferruccio Busoni, and Pablo Casals.

[3] His mother Leopolda played the piano, sang, and composed, and the boy grew hearing Ukrainian and Russian folk songs, and musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, and Johannes Brahms.

[5] In 1915, he was admitted to the upper-division piano class at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he amazed the committee members by his ability to read a score, put it aside, and then play from memory.

[8] Kosenko continued studying composition and music theory under the composer Mikhail Sokolovsky,[2][n 1] piano with Iryna Miklashovskaya,[7] and playing as concertmaster at the Mariinsky Theatre.

[n 2][5] During this time, he received positive evaluations from Alexander Glazunov, director of the institution, who wrote that Kosenko had "great pianistic and compositional abilities, and perfect pitch".

[5] In September 1922, Kosenko gave his first concert, attended by his family and close friends,[1] traveling to Moscow the following year to meet with composers and musicians.

[5] There, he authored a large number of piano pieces, over twenty romances, violin and cello sonatas, works for children, and music for plays.

[5] He then performed as a virtuoso pianist in recitals and formed a piano trio along with violinist Volodymyr Skorokhod and cellist Vasyly Kolomyitsev,[7] giving over one hundred free concerts throughout Ukrainian SSR between 1923 and 1929.

[13] Kosenko originally taught piano and chamber ensemble classes, and a year later, he also began teaching a specialized course on analysis of form in both the historical-theoretical and compositional departments.

[12] After being persuaded by the Soviet government of the time to share his living quarters with members of other families, and frequently bringing in people from the streets to whom he gave food and money, he was given a small three-room apartment on the second floor of an old building at Mikhaila street in Kyiv,[15] to where they all moved thanks to his wife's insistent requests to the Soviet Ukrainian Government in order to recognize Kosenko's efforts in popularizing genuine Ukrainian nationalist music.

[2] Finally in 1938, the sick Kosenko was personally awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour by the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev.

However, this changed when professor Mikhail Sokolovsky singled out Kosenko's romance "Careless wind" set to text of Konstantin Balmont as an example of his students' work.

To expand his horizons, he travelled to Moscow in 1924, where he met Nikolai Myaskovsky, Alexander Goedicke, and Felix Blumenfeld, who supported the young composer.

He became closer to artists such as composers Borys Lyatoshynsky and Levko Revutskiy, and singers Ivan Patrozhynskiy and Maria Litvinenko-Volhemut who all highly evaluated both his musical and pedagogical activity.

"[n 9] Ukrainian Soviet writer Pavlo Tychyna, whose work Kosenko also set to music, highly valued the artistic contributions of the composer, saying of him: "The reflection of his creative soul has permanently left sunny illuminations on my biography.

[1] His first compositions were markedly influenced by the works of composers such as Alexander Scriabin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff,[4] and his compatriot Mykola Lysenko.

With him Kosenko studied the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, and many other romantic-era composers.

[5] Further early influences on Kosenko happened in Warsaw, where he attended the opera house and a variety a concerts, listening to performances by pianists Ferruccio Busoni, Josef Hofmann, and Sergei Rachmaninoff,[3] and the singing of Feodor Chaliapin, Leonid Sobinov, Antonina Nezhdanova, and Solomiya Krushelnytska.

[5] Kosenko organized a piano trio with violinist Volodymyr Skorokhod and cellist Vasyly Kolomyitsev, thus gaining popularity as a performer.

The group gave over one hundred free concerts all around the Zhytomyr area,[2] playing pieces by Mikhail Glinka, Anton Rubinstein, Sergei Taneyev, Alexander Gretchaninov, Georgy Catoire, and Robert Schumann.

With the addition of other musicians they began performing the quartets, quintets and sextets of Alexander Borodin, Joseph Haydn, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Antonín Dvořák and others as well.

In the first, the programme consisted of music by Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, and in the second he performed his own compositions, which remained as part of his repertoire in many subsequent concerts.

Upon graduation from the conservatory, he moved to the capital of the Volhynian Governorate, Zhytomyr, where besides composing and teaching, he invested a lot of time into performing, both as a soloist and accompanist as well.