After his father died when he was 2 years old, his mother remarried a tradesman and they moved to Voronezh.

[1] Soon after, he attended the Moscow University, specializing in Physics and Mathematics, which he graduated from in 1890.

There he met and was strongly influenced by Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky.

In 1893, he published his first work, On certain cases of the motion of a solid body in a fluid, for which he received the N. D. Brashman Award.

In 1899, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.