After being tutored at home, he embarked on a Grand Tour, as was often done by upper-class young European men as a rite of passage.

Upon his return, he entered the Izmailovsky Life Guards regiment, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant captain.

Following several generations of the Naryshkins, Alexander Lvovich was known as a bon vivant, an epicurean and yet forever without money and saddled with debt.

At the Bellevue country estate, he hosted the entire Petersburg society, including Alexander I, who referred to Naryshkin as his cousin.

[2] In the book "Ten Years' Exile", describing concerts of horn music at Naryshkin's estate, Madame de Staël characterized the owner as "an amiable and courteous man," but inclined to seek entertainment not in books, but in a noisy company: surrounded by 20 people, he imagines himself in "philosophical seclusion".