Boris Pilnyak, pseudonym of Boris Andreyevich Vogau, was born in Mozhaisk. His father, a descendant of German colonists, was a veterinarian, and his mother was a teacher for the local zemstvo. He attended school in Nizhny Novgorod and took a correspondence course from the Moscow Commercial Institute and gradutated in 1920 as a candidate of economic sciences, with a specialization in financial administration.

While a student Pilnyak published several short-stories in Russia's literary magazines. He wrote his first story, about an owl, in 1902 at the age of nine. His first publications of prose and poetry came in 1909, when he was 14 years old (In The Spring and Gamzulteivo). But he considered his literary career to have begun when he was published in the journals Russkaya Mysl, Zhatva and others, in 1915.

In that same year, because of the anti-German sentiment during World War I, Pilnyak decided he would have to shed the German-sounding "Vogau" for something more Russian. He derived the pseudonym "Pilnyak" from "Pilnyanka", the name of a Belorussian town where he spent some time with his maternal uncle, the painter Aleksandr Savinov.

During the First World War Pilnyak visited the Eastern Front on behalf of the Provisional Government. After the October Revolution Pilnyak was arrested by Bolshevik soldiers and for a time was in danger of being executed.

Pilnyak came to the attention of Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Education, who provided him with government funds to enable him to write full-time. His first novel, Golii god (The Naked Year - 1922), dealt with the October Revolution and the Civil War. He accepted the revolution itself, but did not embrace orthodox Communism.

His story, Povest' nepogashennoi luny (The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon - 1926), about the suspicious death of Mikhail V. Frunze, created a storm and the Novy Mir magazine, in which the story appeared, was immediately confiscated.

Pilnyak also upset Joseph Stalin with his novel, Krasnoye derevo (Mahogany - 1929), that was published in Germany. The book, which provided a sympathetic portrait of a supporter of Leon Trotsky, was banned in the Soviet Union.

When Pilnyak was writing The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1931), a novel about the Five Year Plan, Nikolai Yezhov, of the GPU, was given the task of checking his manuscript. His novels were severely criticized by the Soviet regime as bourgeois.

In 1931, Pilnyak visited the United States and attacked American industrialization in O'Kei (1932). Some of his short stories have been translated in Tales of the Wilderness (1925) and Mother Earth and Other Stories (1968).

A writers conference was held in March 1936 to consider how to battle against formalism and naturalism. Pilnyak, Pasternak, Leonov, Fedin, and Lidin were all blasted. Then in August 1936 came the trial of the "Trotskyite Center". Boris Pilnyak continued to bravely write books that went against the government line of Socialist Realism and he was arrested by the NKPD on October 6, 1937.

No one ever heard from him again, and it is assumed he was executed in 1937. He reportedly died on September 9, 1941, although there is some controvery about the exact date. He was rehabilitated on December 6, 1956.