He was born Timothy in the village of Korotsko in the Novgorod region in seventeen twenty four, the youngest son of a village sacristan who died and left the family destitute. The poverty of that childhood is not a pious flourish; the family came near to giving him away to a coachman for food, and he worked in the fields for bread as a boy.

At sixteen he was taken into the Novgorod seminary on a state place. He was very good at it. He stayed on as a teacher, first of Greek, then of rhetoric and philosophy, and in seventeen fifty eight, at thirty four, he was tonsured a monk with the name Tikhon. Advancement came fast after that: rector, archimandrite, then in seventeen sixty one a vicar bishop, and in February of seventeen sixty three, bishop of Voronezh.

Voronezh was a hard diocese: enormous, poor, thinly clergied, with a half-pagan folk festival still running in the town and a clergy many of whom could barely read the service. He spent four and a half years on it. He founded a seminary, wrote instructions for the priests in language they could actually use, preached constantly, and shut down the festival by walking into it. Then his health broke and he asked to be released.

The Synod let him go in seventeen sixty seven, and in seventeen sixty nine he settled at the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Zadonsk, where he lived until his death. He kept no rank there. He wore what the monks wore, he refused to be served, and he asked to be treated as the last of the brotherhood, which the brotherhood found hard and did not always manage.

The retirement was not a rest. He suffered long stretches of what he called darkness and what a modern reader would call depression, and he wrote out of it rather than around it. He gave away his pension, in small sums, constantly, in person, to peasants and prisoners, and he went into the villages and the jails himself. Serfs came to his door and were let in, in a century when this was not usual for a former bishop.

Almost all of his writing is from these years: On True Christianity, and A Spiritual Treasury Gathered from the World, which takes ordinary sights, a road, a mirror, a debt, a seed, and turns each into a short meditation. He is the most Scriptural of the Russian writers of his century, and the least interested in showing his education. He wrote to be read by people who had not had one.

He died at Zadonsk on the thirteenth of August, seventeen eighty three, in his sixtieth year. He had been ill for a long time and had, according to the accounts, known and said when it would be.

His relics were found incorrupt when the grave was opened, and the Holy Synod glorified him in eighteen sixty one, in one of the great public events of the Russian church of that century, with a crowd at Zadonsk that the reports put in the hundreds of thousands. The relics were seized in the Soviet period and returned in nineteen ninety one; they are at Zadonsk again.

The Church keeps his memory on the thirteenth of August, the day of his repose, and on the fourteenth of May, the uncovering of his relics. He is one of the four Russian bishops of the synodal period whom the Church numbers among the great teachers, and the only one of them who put the office down.