Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky was born on 25 November 1838 to a family of a peasant priest. In 1847 entered the Boguslav religious school. Upon graduating from the Kiev Theological Academy (1865) he taught Russian language, history, and geography in the Poltava Theological Seminary (1865–1866) and, later, in the different gymnasiums in Kalisz, Siedlce (1867–1872), and Kishinev (1873–1874). He started writing in 1865, but due to Russian imperial censorship his works appeared only in Galician periodicals, such as the journal Pravda, Dilo, and Zoria (Lviv). He died of hunger in 1918 in one of almshouses of Kiev.