Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomialovsky was known as a creature of his time, rather than a master of it. Yet, a reading of his works proves this valuation to be an unfair assessment of a serious, talented, and original writer. Pomialovsky's publishing career lasted a meager four years (1859-1863), a period during which the greatest Russian novelists--Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev--as well as the radical critics Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Ivanovich Pisarev were making their marks on history. Like many other young graduates of Russian Orthodox seminaries during the early liberalism of Alexander II's regime, Pomialovsky turned his back on a career in the church to engage in civic and literary activism. His hospitalizations for alcohol-related illness and his early death at the age of twenty-eight were sadly typical of these shestidesiatniki (people of the 1860s). Pomialovsky left to posterity a small but...