OBITUARY.

On October 5, at 2:20 p.m., in his 29th year of life, our well-known writer Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomyalovsky passed away. He did not live long, he had not yet said much, but even in this short activity he managed to demonstrate the giftedness of his nature to us and immediately took his place among our best talents.

Nikolai Gerasimovich was born in St. Petersburg, in Malaya Okhta. His father, a deacon of the local cemetery church, having no means to give his son a proper upbringing, placed him, at government expense, in the religious district school at the Nevsky Monastery, and here the deceased spent 8 years amidst that unattractive environment which he described with such bright truth in his "Sketches of the Bursa" original: "Ocherki Bursy". Later he was transferred to the seminary, where he lived for another 6 years, and only after this 14-year training was Nikolai Gerasimovich finally released into God's world to seek a life after his own heart.

The bursa religious school dormitory/seminary had a tremendous influence on the character and mindset of the deceased. Here, under the influence of eternal cuffs, slaps, and beatings, by which the bursa of that time corrected its pupils, Pomyalovsky first developed a hostile attitude toward the bursa education and, having worked out his "zero forever" regarding this science, began to gradually acquire an original, realistic view of things. But this very same bursa also ruined him; it poisoned his infancy, broke his best hopes, and instilled in him a distrust and painful apathy toward life, so that until the last days of his life he could not recall the bursa without horror and disgust.

Pomyalovsky brought few scraps of knowledge out of the bursa, and he had to work out his convictions with his own head and his own experience. Looking closely at life, he saw that much here is done completely differently than it seemed in the bursa, and with ardor he began to seek the truth: he read books, checked what he had read against life, analyzed the phenomena he encountered...