 In 1909 he graduated from the Russian school in Helsinki, and started studying biology at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of the Saint Petersburg State University.As of 1910, he studied the flora of the Far East in the Herbarium of the Saint Petersburg Botanical Garden under Vladimir Leontyevich Komarov.He participated in field expeditions to the Trans-Baikal Barguzin district (1912), the South-Ussuri region in the Primorskaya Oblast (1913), the Semipalatinsk Oblast (1914), and Iran (1916).