Krestovsky came from an old family of Polish gentry (
szlachta) with roots in nowadays Ukraine. In 1857 he enrolled in the Historico-Philological faculty of
St Petersburg University. At the university he became friends with the radical critic
Dmitry Pisarev, and wrote for the magazine
Russian Word. After his short association with the radical camp, he joined a group of moderate
slavophiles which included
Apollon Maykov,
Lev Mei and others, and began publishing his works in
Notes of the Fatherland,
Time and
Epoch. In 1860 he left the university to become a professional writer. His novel
The Slums of Saint Petersburg (1864), a product of many hours of personal observation, gained him considerable popularity. In 1863 he traveled to
Warsaw to take notes for his novel
The Flock of Panurge (1869), about the
January Uprising. In 1874 he wrote another novel,
The Force, on the same subject. Both novels were
reactionary in nature. In the 1880s Krestovsky became frankly and openly
anti-Semitic in his political and social views. His blatantly anti-Semitic trilogy
The Jews are Coming was published between 1888 and 1892. He died in Warsaw in 1895. ==English translations==