The play “The Mournful Brotherhood” by the Russian writer, publicist and playwright Pyotr Dmitrievich Boborykin (1836–1921) is a wonderful sketch about the life and morals of writers in Russia in the 1860s, where the personal dramas of writers unfold against the backdrop of an internal editorial conflict in one of the famous thick magazines. P.D. Boborykin, an attentive observer and chronicler of the era, recorded in detail the events of cultural life taking place around him, in which he himself took an active part as an author, employee and publisher of the magazine “Library for Reading”. “The Mournful Brotherhood” presents a whole gallery of portraits: the prototypes for its heroes were N. G. Pomyalovsky, Ap. A. Grigoriev, N. A. Nekrasov, N. N. Strakhov and a number of other notable participants in the literary life of those years. The text of the work is published for the first time, the manuscript itself was considered lost by its author. A clerk's copy of "The Mournful Brotherhood" was discovered during the formation of the rare book fund of the Scientific Library of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Previously, it belonged to the famous bibliophile and bibliographer E. I. Yakushkin (1826–1905). It is from this copy that this publication has been prepared. The publishing design has been preserved in PDF A4 format.