 Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart () in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg".He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet.His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist.