The idea to set Gogol's "Marriage" to music came from the advice and influence of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who began to compose his own experimental opera, "The Stone Guest", to Alexander Pushkin's tragedy just two years earlier (in 1866). Dargomyzhsky declared that the text would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the 'unrealistic' division between aria and recitative in favour of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two.