Education
He graduated from the faculty of history and philology at Saint St. Petersburg University in 1854.
He graduated from the faculty of history and philology at Saint St. Petersburg University in 1854.
Mordovets"s father was a Zaporozhian Cossack and an estate manager. Mordovets spent his childhood in Sloboda Ukraine, where he learned the Russian language in school. Mordovets"s literary debut came in the mid-1850s when he began writing in Ukrainian.
His first work was the poem The Cossacks and the Sea (1854, published 1859).
He began writing in Russian in the 1860s. His novella New Russian People (1868) dealt with the Narodniks and their cause, and with the position of raznochintsy intellectuals, as did the novel Signs of the Times (1869), although Mordovets did not share the views of the Narodniks.
His historical novels were widely read. (The False Dmitry, 1879.
Tsar Peter and the Regent Sophia, 1885.
The Tsar and the Hetman, 1880. Lord Novgorod the Great, 1882. Foreign Whose Sins?, 1890).
These novels demonstrated Mordovets"s democratic leanings.
He served for more than thirty years as an official in Saratov and was the editor of the Saratov Provincial News. Mordovets also published many historical works, such as Impostors and the Freemen of the Lower Reaches (1867), The Haidamak Uprising (1870), Political Movements of the Russian People (2 vols, 1871), and On the Eve of Freedom (1872, published 1889), and his memoirs, From My Past and Experiences (1902, written in Ukrainian), in which he tells of his meetings with Taras Shevchenko and Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
His historical works were received favorably in Saint St. Petersburg academic circles, and he was even considered for a position on the faculty of Saint St. Petersburg University.
He contributed to several popular journals, including Russian Word, Notes of the Fatherland, and Affairs.