Michael was born around 1400 in the Republic of Novgorod, believed to be of the princely Rurikid family — a royal Muscovite kinsman.
In 1408, Michael mysteriously arrived at the Trinity Monastery of Klopsko near Novgorod — without identifying himself, taking up the Russian vocation of the 'Fool for Christ' (yurodivy) — in institutional continuity with the earlier Byzantine tradition of St. Andrew the Fool for Christ of Constantinople (10th c., see his entry).
Michael spent the 45 years (1408–1453) at the Trinity Monastery of Klopsko — undertaking the Russian holy-fool discipline: feigning madness, enduring beating and ridicule, giving away whatever the faithful gave him to the poor, and exercising the hidden charism of spiritual discernment and prophetic confrontation of worldly authority.
Michael became famous during his lifetime for his famous prophetic pronouncements to the Novgorodian princely-aristocratic class — prophesying the imminent Muscovite conquest of the Republic of Novgorod (fulfilled in 1478 by Grand Prince Ivan III the Great).
He died at Klopsko on January 11, 1453. His cult established the Novgorodian variant of the Russian holy-fool tradition — producing the Russian yurodivy tradition that would extend through the Sts. Basil the Blessed of Moscow (1552, the famous fool-for-Christ of the Red Square Cathedral), Xenia of St. Petersburg (1806), and the continuing Russian Catholic-Orthodox holy-fool charism.