Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804 - 1857) in 1824. From a portrait by M Terebenev. Glinka's studies at the boarding school were supervised by a tutor specially assigned to him. This was the poet Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, who was a close friend of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and who later took part in the uprising of the Decembrists in 1825. Kuchelbecker and his friends, among them the poet and Decembrist Kondraty Ryleyev, acquainted Glinka with the advanced ideas of his epoch and won his adherence to the lofty ideals for which the finest men in Russia were fighting at that time. Supplied By: SCRSS - Society for Co-operation in Russian & Soviet Studies