On August 26, 1797, in the little village of Anginskoe, Irkutsk Province, a boy was born to the local sacristan Popov and his wife, and was given the name of Ivan.
Little Ivan was a bright child. At the age of four the boy, under the tutelage of his ailing father, had started to read, and by 1803, when his father died, the boy read fluently.
To ease the burden of Ivan's mother, now a widow with four children, Ivan's uncle, who was his father's brother and the local deacon, took the boy into his own family.