His father, a doctor, died when the boy was young, and he was brought up by his maternal grandfather, M. Rossiansky, an Orthodox Jew, who taught him Hebrew and took him to the synagogue.

In 1894 he began to study law at Moscow University, but spent more time preaching socialism to the workers, but by 1896 he found Marxist economic theories unsatisfactory, though he remained a socialist.

In 1899 he wrote a revolutionary pamphlet which got him expelled from Moscow; so he completed his studies of philosophy and political economy in Berlin.

In 1901 Peter Berngardovich Struve invited Frank to contribute to his collection, The Problem of Idealism (published in 1902), which criticised materialism and positivism.

He spent the next five years between Moscow and Germany, writing and translating philosophical works and assisting Struve.

In 1906 he moved to St Petersburg and contributed philosophical essays to Struve's periodical, Russkaya Mysl.

In 1908, he married Tatyana Sergeevna Bartseva (1886–1984) with whom he would have four children: Alexei (1910–1969), Natalia (1912–1999), Vasiliy (1920–1996) and Victor.

Later, he wrote, "I consider my Christianity as the completion of my Old Testament upbringing, as an organic evolution based on the religious foundations which I accepted in my childhood".

[1] Frank spent 1913–1914 in Germany, where he wrote Der Gegenstand des Wissens ('The Object of Knowledge') for which he received his master's degree (1916).

On 29 September 1922 some 160 prominent intellectuals and their families were expelled (at their own expense and not return without the permission of the Soviet authorities) on a so-called "philosophers' ship" from Petrograd to Stettin, where they arrived on 2 October.

[3] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service required an Aryan certificate from all employees and officials in the public sector, including education.