Sergey Klychkov was born into the family of peasants and Old Believers. He studied a few years in a district school in Taldom, where he probably started to write poems. In 1900-1907 he studied in a real school in Moscow; in 1906 he started to be published. A year later he got acquainted with Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky and made a trip to Italy with him.

 In 1908 he entered the Moscow University, several times changed to different faculties and was finally expelled in 1913 for default in payment.

The first collection of Klychkov’s poetry was published in 1911 and actually received only negative responses. His next collection, on the contrary, got a warm welcome from readers and secured Klychkov a place among the “new peasant” school of poets, which developed around Nikolai Klyuev by 1914-1916.

In September, 1914 he was summoned to the field army and spent more than two years in Helsingfors, then was transferred to the Western frontline, and later to the Crimea. In spring 1917 he arrived in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and then moved to Moscow, where he mostly changed for writing prose, which glorified him much more than poetry. In the early 1930s Klychkov, just like all other “peasant poets” found himself in a desperate situation: his original works could not be published any more, and direct denunciations were written against him. Klychkov first resorted to editing of epics; his versions of Mari folk songs appeared in press. As well as majority of his contemporaries, in those years Klychkov was compelled to resort to translations of the “great multinational poetry of the USSR” from word-per-word translations.

The poet was arrested on the basis of a false delation on July 31, 1937, and shot down on October 8.