Alexander was educated at Moscow University, where he met the poet Vasily Zhukovsky; they formed a friendship that lasted until the death of Turgenev.

The materials thus collected were made available to the Archaeological Commission by order of Tsar Nicholas I, and published in 1841 and 1842 under the Latin title Historiae Russiae Monumenta ex antiquis exterarum gentium archivis et bibliothecis deprompta ab A. I.

[1] Turgenev was close to many representatives of science and literature, both Russian and foreign, and Ivan Dmitriev and Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky were among his friends.

[1] All his life he never stopped learning, and his letters were, according to I. N. Sreznevsky, "one of the treasures of our literature, with the diversity and richness of the historical information, vivid and true, and all the thoughts and feelings expressed in them.

[2] Then in 1844, the botanist Boissier published Turgeniopsis is a monotypic genus of flowering plants (from Bulgaria and western asia) but also belonging to the family Apiaceae.