His father was a deacon in the Eastern Orthodox Church in Malaya Okhta, a village on the bank of the Neva River, across from Saint Petersburg.

The story tells of the progress of an intelligent but awkward orphan boy under the abuse and mistreatment of guardians and educators before he finally finds a teacher whose fatherly love he can respond to.

[3] In 1860 he started teaching at the largest of Saint Petersburg's Sunday schools, which were staffed by volunteers, and designed to educate the children of the working class.

As a result of this success, he attended many parties, and drank heavily, which eventually landed him in the hospital with delirium tremens.

His novel Molotov (1861- also published in Sovremennik), the sequel to Bourgeois Happiness, secured his reputation, and brought him into the company of writers like Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

[3] He had hoped to find solidarity and fellowship in the Saint Petersburg literary circles, but found only backbiting, petty ambitions, and what he saw as condescension from the established gentry writers.

He began disappearing for weeks at a time, living in the Saint Petersburg slums among prostitutes and criminals, and continuing to feed his addiction to alcohol.

[1] After Seminary Sketches, Pomyalovsky had begun work on a major novel, Brother and Sister, dealing with lower class Saint Petersburg life, but it went unfinished.