The emergence of a Russian school of composition is usually traced with justification to the work of Mikhail Glinka. His operas A Life for the Tsar (also referred to by the name of its hero as Ivan Susanin), premièred in 1836, and Ruslan and Lyudmila, premièred in 1842, are corner-stones of the repertory and models for the composer's successors. It is logical to devote the first chapter to the contemporary view of these works, and worthwhile to devote a great part of Chapter 4 to them as well, since discussions of their relative merits in the 1860s had a role to play in shaping later Russian opera.

(a) V. F. Odoyevsky: Letter to a music lover on the subject of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar. The Northern Bee, 7 December 1836, no. 280. MLN, pp. 118–19

Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky (1804–69) earns mention in many fields of activity. His life was divided between the two capitals: until 1826 he was in Moscow, from then until 1862 in St Petersburg, and thereafter in Moscow again. His career in the civil service took him to several ministries, the Public Library, the Rumyantsev Museum and the Senate, in all of which his interest in education, the natural sciences, technology and almost every other human endeavour was welcome, or at any rate potentially useful. He had a further career – the one for which he is most renowned – as a man of letters, writing short stories and the Utopian novel The Year 4338. St Petersburg Letters (4338–y god. Peterburgskiye pis'ma), and being on friendly terms with Pushkin, Belinsky and other literary figures of the time.[…]