Daniil Andreev's older brother was V.L. Andreev. On November 2, 1906, Daniil Andreev was born in Berlin's Grunewald at Gerbertshtrasse, 26. A few days after the birth of Daniil, his mother dies from a postpartum fever. The shocked father blames the newborn son for the death of his beloved wife, and the grandmother Euphrosyne Varfolomeevna Veligorskaya (1846-1913) takes the boy to Moscow, to the family of her other daughter, Elizaveta Mikhailovna Dobrova (1868-1942), the wife of the famous Moscow doctor Philip Alexandrovich Dobrov. At this time, the Dobrovs lived in Chulkov's house (No. 38), on the corner of Arbat and Spasopeskovsky Lane. Daniil was often sick, it was hard work for his adopted family to help him survive. Later the Dobrovs settle in Maly Levshinsky Lane (No. 5). Andreev's grandmother contracts diphtheria from ill Daniil and then dies. That summer, at a dacha on the Black River near St. Petersburg, a boy was stopped at the last moment on a bridge across the river: he was about to drown himself, yearning to see his mother and grandmother again. Surrounded by care and attention, the boy was brought up in the family of his aunt as her own son. The Dobrov House was one of the literary and musical centers of Moscow at the time. Among guests in Daniil's home were famous people: I. A. Bunin, M. Gorky (Daniil's godfather), A. N. Scriabin, F. I. Chaliapin, actors of the Art Theater, etc. Under the influence of the atmosphere of the house, the boy begins to write poems and prose early. In the spring of 1915 he wrote his first poem, "The Garden". In the same year, the first stories are written: “The Journey of Insects” and “The Life of Antediluvian Animals” (not preserved). Also in childhood, according to the memoirs of his spouse A. A. Andreeva, Daniil writes a great epic, where the action takes place in a fictional interplanetary space. In his room, the boy draws portraits of the rulers of the dynasty he invented, portraits as tall as the boy.