“ A famous Russian composer, founder, with Glinka, of the Russian National School of Music. He was the son of a wealthy nobleman in the Government of Tula. Speechless to his sixth year, he early exhibited fondness for music, and was taught the piano at six and violin at eight; his teachers, later, were Sehoberlechner, a pupil of Hummel, in piano, and Zeibich in musical theory and singing. At Saint Petersburg in 1833 he met Glinka, who lent Dargomyzhsky his copy of Dehn's lectures on musical theory, which "he studied through in five months." ”

“ Orchestration and composition he learned practically by assisting Glinka in the production of his Life of the Czar and by organizing various aquatic serenades on the Neva River, with private orchestras. He had by this time acquired a reputation as a song-writer, pianist, and quartet-violinist, and he decided to embrace music as a career. Later, in 1843, he gave up his governmental clerkship. He selected Hugo's Lucrezin Borgia for an opera, but, on the advice of Zhukovsky (q.v.) , abandoned it in favor of Esmeralda, based on the Hunchback of Notre Dame. ”