Yevhen Hrebinka was born in 1812 on his father's farm outside Pyriatyn, the town where this novel begins, and went to school at Nizhyn, where he was already writing verse and fables in Ukrainian and in Russian. In 1834 he moved to St Petersburg, and there he stayed. His Little Russian Fables came out the same year, and they are the Ukrainian work he is best remembered for.In the capital he wrote more and more in Russian, and more and more in prose. S. D. Zubkov's preface to the 1988 edition counts more than forty tales, novels, stories and sketches in fifteen years, printed in nearly every journal of the day, and the subjects run from the Ukrainian past to the government clerk and the serf. He did not forget where he came from. He took part in buying Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom in 1838, helped to publish Shevchenko's first book of poems, Kobzar, in 1840, and in 1841 brought out The Swallow, an almanac of Ukrainian writing.Chaikovsky came out in 1843. The critic Vissarion Belinsky, as the preface records, counted it among the best original tales of that year, praised its colonel and "many features of the historical life of Little Russia" for their poetic truth, and called Marina the book's heroine. By the account of Hrebinka's contemporaries the novel was built from his own family's stories - his mother came of a family of Chaikovskys - and from episodes of the folk duma of Aleksei Popovich.He died at St Petersburg on 15 December 1848, aged thirty-six.