[1] Konrad was born in Riga to a German father who was a railway engineer while his mother was the daughter of a priest from the Oryol Governorate.
He studied at the Oriental Faculty of Saint Petersburg University, attending lectures by Lev Sternberg at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.
[2] Konrad then taught at Leningrad University, and became professor of Japanese language and literature there from 1922 to 1939.
He knew Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s,[3] and Bakhtin later cited Konrad, Dmitry Likhachov and Juri Lotman as the three most important Russian literary theorists.
[4] After his fellow scholar Nikolai Nevsky and his wife were arrested on charges of spying, Konrad found their two-year-old daughter left in their apartment; he brought the girl up as his own after her parents' execution.