Alexander Remy was born in 1809 in the city of Saint Petersburg into a Russian noble family Remy (family) of Swiss descent. The ancestor of Remy came to Russia in 1787, when the officer Jean-Gabriel Remy entered the Engineering Corps in Saint Petersburg. The mansion of Alexander Remy housed the newly married couple of Pavel Chekhov and Yevgeniya Chekhova, the parents of Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who rented one of the rooms in 1854-1855. This gave Anton Chekhov the motif for his story "The House with an Attic" in 1896.