Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart[1] (Russian: Игорь Семёнович Штейнгарт) 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,[3] and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist.