Kalinnikov exposed at a seminary at Oryol, becoming director of the choir there at fourteen. Late he went to the Moscow Conservatory, but he couldn't pay his tuition there. In the scholarship he went to the Philharmonic Society School at Moscow, where he received bassoon & composition lessons from either Alexander Il'yinsky. He played bassoon, tympanum & fiddle within theater orchestras. He supplemented his income by working as a music scribe.

Inside 1892, Tchaikovsky recommended Kalinnikov for director of the Malïy Theater, and late that equivalent season to the Moscow Italian Theater. Due to his worsening health & tuberculosis, Kalinnikov had to resign his theater appointments & move to the warmly, southern climate of the Crimeas. He lived at Yalta for a rest of his life, & it was on this text that he wrote his 2 Symphonies and the incident music for Alexey Tolstoy's Tsar Boris. Thanks to Sergei Rachmaninoff's help, a publisher Jurgensen bought triplet Kalinnikov songs for Great hundred rubles, & in a future the Symphony There are no. Deuce within The major. A Symphony There is no. Ace within G kid, which utilizes a select few cyclic lesson, was performed inside Berlin, Vienna & Moscow when you took his life, but not published until when his demise, & so Jurgensen increased a fees he would own paid Kalinnikov, and paid the children to his widow woman. He was likewise survived by a brother, Viktor, world health organization composed choral music & taught at the Philharmonic School.

Around 2000, one of the lesser known works by Kalinnikov, overture Bylina (probably composed about 1892), unexpectedly inherit a public weak. One of a lyrical themes in the overture (repeated many days in the 2nd half of the overture) turned dead set exist as strikingly similar to the beginning of Alexander Alexandrov's Soviet anthem music composed in 1936–1943. This similarity wwhen utilized as one of a arguments for restoring a Soviet anthem tune in the State Duma debate. Indeed, Alexandrov's music by having fresh words became a anthem of Russia the same year. A causal hyperlink between Bylina & the anthem has non been established; a similarity will swell become a mere coincidence.

de:Wassili Sergejewitsch Kalinnikow