Little information has been preserved about the parents of Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin. They were descendants of the so-called economic peasants (managed by the College of Economy) — a special category of peasants formed during the reign of Catherine II. The appearance of the depicted man does not quite correspond to the common idea of a peasant: Dmitry Gerasimovich Sytin is clean-shaven, dressed in a brown coat with a black vest and a white shirt with a dark tie; he has a ring on the index finger of his right hand. Ivan Sytin’s father Dmitry Sytin graduated from the Konteyevskoye Rural Parish School, served as a clerk, and then as a senior clerk of the volost board of the village of Gnezdnikovo in the Soligalichsky Uyezd of the Kostroma Governorate. Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin was born there on February 5, 1851. He was the eldest of four children.

Ivan Sytin later recalled,

Dmitry Sytin sent his eldest son to a parochial school, where Ivan stayed for three years, studying the Book of Hours, the psalter and arithmetic. When Seryozha (Sergey) — his younger brother — was born in 1863, Ivan had to drop out and go to work. His working life began at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, where he helped a furrier sell his products. The surprisingly tall, intelligent and diligent young man was not very upset when he had to drop out of school. Subsequently, Ivan Sytin recalled those years as follows, “I left school as a lazy boy who got disgusted with the teaching and the book — very much tired of this task to memorize everything for three years straight.” Soon after, the head of the family, Dmitry Sytin, lost his job. However, he found the strength to start all over again: he moved his family to the town of Galich, where he began working as a clerk in the zemstvo board.