Ivan Kireyevsky and his brother Pyotr were born into a cultivated noble family of considerable means. Their father was known for hating French atheism so passionately that he would burn heaps of Voltaire's books, acquired specifically for the purpose; his fatal disease was contracted while healing the wounded soldiers during the French invasion of Russia. The boy was just six at the time of his death; he was brought up by a maternal uncle, Vasily Zhukovsky, and the mother, M-me Avdotya Yelagina, an influential lady who held a brilliant salon in Moscow. She professed her dislike of Peter the Great for his treatment of his wife Eudoxia and the Lopukhin family, to which she was related. The father's distaste for French culture and the mother's distrust of post-Petrine officialdom may have shaped Kireyevsky's views on Russia and its history.