Since Russian music officially joined the musical currents of Western Europe, it has developed at a slant derived from the constant pressure of (mainly) German music. It has been fed and watered by it and, what is more, to such a strong degree that the views, tastes and impulses towards creativity and, ultimately, the actual methods and structures taking root in Russian musical consciousness – ones essentially alien to it – have been accepted by us as something fit and proper beyond dispute or challenge, the one and only correct and immutable ones. Something introduced through education turned, by the force of its historical influence, into dogma, into a would-be logical scheme of compositional technique, that is, inevitably resulting from a priori laws and from the nature of musical thought. The customary began to be regarded as organic, and, through preconceived formulas, began to winnow out everything that was alive, irrepressible, and unwilling to be subordinated to rational theories. Wagner himself was accepted with caution, after a delay, with restrictions, and it took propaganda from figures on the periphery of the musical world for present-day German and French composers to break through.