Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was born in Tiflis, Imperial Russia (now Tbilisi, Georgia) to a poor Armenian family. In his youth, he was fascinated by the music he heard around him, but at first he did not study music or learn to read it. In 1921 he travelled to Moscow to join his brother, the stage director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre. Although he had almost no musical education, Khachaturian showed such great talent that he was admitted to the Gnessin Institute where he studied cello under Sergey Bychkov, and later Andrey Borysyak.