Constantine Shapiro was born in Saratov, Russia, into a family that included the distinguished philologists, Viktor Zhirmunsky and Yury Tynianov. After graduating from the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow in 1914, he matriculated at the Law Faculty of Moscow University where he studied with I. A. Il'in, a direct continuator of the Russian philosophical tradition of Vladimir Solovyov and SergeyTrubetskoy. His studies were interrupted by the Revolution; he emigrated to Germany in 1919, first to Freiburg, where he studied philosophy at the University under Edmund Husserl, then Leipzig, where he received a certificate in cello from Julius Klengel. Until his departure from Germany for France and Palestine in 1926, he was first cellist with the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. In 1928 he settled in Japan, where he remained through the Second World War, and immigrated to the United States in 1952. He died in 1992 in his ninety-sixth year.