Educated in military schools, he served as an officer in the army, a career he soon abandoned for a more lively and diversified life as a journalist, hunter, fisherman, actor, and circus worker. Literary fame came with Poyedinok (1905; The Duel), a realistically sordid picture of the emptiness of life in a remote military garrison. Its appearance during the Russo-Japanese War coincided with and confirmed a national wave of antimilitary sentiment. Kuprin wrote prolifically; his subjects might be best described by the title of one of his best known stories, Reka zhizni (1906; “The River of Life”). He is a fascinated and an undiscriminating observer of the stream of life and especially of any milieu that constitutes a world of its own—a cheap hotel, a factory, a house of prostitution, a tavern, a circus, or a race track. His best known novel, Yama (1909–15; Yama: The Pit), deals with the red-light district of a southern port city. It dwells with enthusiasm on the minutiae of the everyday life of the prostitutes, their housekeeping, economics, and social stratification. As Kuprin's spokesman in the novel puts it, “all the horror is just this—that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that is all. . . .”

Kuprin's style is extremely natural. He picks up the slang and argot that is peculiar to his subject and describes everything with zest and colour and with a goodness of heart that compensates for any shortcomings he may have in originality or intellectual depth. After the Revolution, Kuprin became one of the many Russian émigrés in Paris, where he continued to write, although exile was not fruitful for his essentially extroverted, reportorial talent. In 1937 he was allowed to return to the Soviet Union.