His works reflect his immersion in the Ukrainian revolutionary milieu, among impoverished and working-class people, and among émigrés from the Russian Empire living in Western Europe.

Vynnychenko was born in a village, Vesely Kut (today – Hryhorivka, Novoukrainka Raion), in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, in a family of peasants.

[3] His father Kyrylo Vasyliovych Vynnychenko earlier in his life was a peasant-serf who moved from a village to the city of Yelisavetgrad, where he married a widow, Yevdokia Pavlenko (nee: Linnyk).

Upon graduating from a local public school the Vynnychenko family managed to enroll Volodymyr at the Yelyzavetgrad Male Gymnasium[3] (today the building of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine).

[4] As a member of the RUP[3] he provided political agitation and propaganda among the Kievan workers and peasants from Poltava[3] and was jailed for several months in Lukyanivska Prison.

[3] Afterward, due to a new arrest he was forcibly drafted into a punitive battalion in the Russian Imperial army[3] where he began to agitate soldiers with revolutionary propaganda.

[citation needed] In 1906 Vynnychenko was arrested for a third time, again for his political activities, and jailed for a year; before his scheduled trial, however, the wealthy patron of Ukrainian literature and culture, Yevhen Chykalenko, paid his bail, and Vynnychenko fled Ukraine again, effectively becoming an émigré writer abroad from 1907 to 1914, living in Lemberg (Lviv), Vienna, Geneva, Paris, Florence, Berlin.

From 1914 to 1917 Vynnychenko lived illegally near Moscow throughout much of World War I[4] and returned to Kiev in 1917 to assume a leading role in Ukrainian politics.

Writing in his diary in 1919, he recalled that “from the time the landowner Bodisko beat my father on his estate, fooled him, exploited him, chased him from his plot into the field, where I was tending livestock, from that moment I already took into my soul the seed of hatred for social exploitation, for Bodiskos of all types.” Other youthful experiences added feelings of national humiliation and anger to these social emotions.

[9] After the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, Vynnychenko served as the head of the General Secretariat, a representative executive body of the Russian Provisional Government in Ukraine.

Within days, Mikhail Muravyov managed to invade Kiev, forcing the government to evacuate to Zhytomyr whose retreat was secured by the efforts of the Yevhen Konovalets Sich Riflemen.

In 1934, Vynnychenko moved from Paris to Mougins, near Cannes, on the Mediterranean coast, where he lived on a homestead type residence as a self-supporting farmer and continued to write, notably a philosophical exposition of his ideas about happiness, Concordism.

During the German occupation of France, for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis, Vynnychenko was thrown into a concentration camp, which affected his health severely.

Rosalia Lifshitz after her death passed the estate to Ivanna Vynnykiv-Nyzhnyk (1912–1993), who emigrated to France after World War II and lived with Vynnychenko since 1948.

[12][13] Vynnychenko has not been as popular as Mykhailo Hrushevsky as a political figure,[14] but is widely known as writer; his work was adapted for screen numerous times since the 1990s by Dovzhenko Film Studios directors.

Vynnychenko's archives are housed in Columbia University, New York City and supervised by a commission of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences.