Konstantin Aksakov

His father Sergey Aksakov and his sister Vera Aksakova were writers, and his younger brother, Ivan Aksakov, was a journalist. The first to publish an analysis of Nikolai Gogol's 1842 work Dead Souls; he compared the author with Homer and with Shakespeare. In 1856, after Tsar Alexander II's, Aksakov sent the emperor a letter advising him to restore the zemsky sobor. Aksakov also penned a number of articles on Slavonic linguistics.

Aksakov was born into a family of prominent Russian writer Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov (1791—1859) and his wife Olga Semyonovna Zaplatina (1793—1878). His paternal grandfather Timofey Stepanovich Aksakov belonged to an old noble Aksakov family whose members claimed to be the decedents of Šimon. Their first documented ancestor was Ivan Feodorivich Velyaminov nicknamed Oksak who lived during the 15th century. His family crest was based on the Polish Przyjaciel coat of arms (also known as Aksak) which is considered to be of Tatar origin in Poland (the word «oksak» means «lame» in Turkic languages). All this led some researchers to believe that the Aksakov family also originated from Tatars, despite they had no relation to the Polish noble house. Aksakov's maternal grandfather was a Russian General Semyon Grigorievich Zaplatin who fought under the command of Alexander Suvorov and who married a Turkish captive Igel-Syum. Aksakov was raised on a country estate before he moved to Moscow with his family. He remained with his parents his entire life, without ever marrying or moving out of the house. He studied at Moscow State University, and he became a member of the Stankevitch Circle, a group of Russian Hegelians and early believers of Russian democracy. Aksakov eventually made the acquaintance of Ivan Kireyevsky and Aleksey Khomyakov, adopted their philosophy of Slavophilism and broke off all contact with the Stankevitch Circle.