spring 1905 meant he could not take his law finals. His certificates (dated April 1906) show that he never graduated, but merely audited his courses and received a half-course diploma. But whether this was a consequence of the disturbances or of backsliding on his own part is unclear. A more notable event of 1905, on the face of it, was his engagement in August to his cousin Yekaterina (Katya) Nosenko, the orphaned younger daughter of his Ustilug uncle. Since their first meeting in 1890, he had been growing steadily closer to this softly spoken but intelligent girl, 17 months his senior; and when they married in January 1906 (without the dispensation necessary for first cousins under Orthodox law), it was a love-match which would survive debilitating illness and, on his side, candid duplicities until her death in 1939. It may have been (as he later claimed) as a wedding present to Katya that, during the late spring and summer at Ustilug, he composed a vocal-orchestral setting of three erotic early poems by Pushkin under the title Favn' i pastushka (The Faun and the Shepherdess). Meanwhile he had embarked on a radical revision of the symphony under Rimsky-Korsakov's close scrutiny. And it must have been Rimsky-Korsakov who set up the semi-private dry runs of these two works by the Imperial Court Orchestra under Hugo Wahrlich in April 1907 (the Pushkin cycle on the 14th/27th, the two middle movements of the symphony on the 16th/29th), just as it was Rimsky-Korsakov who in due course arranged for the cycle to be published by Belyayev. Stravinsky later claimed (in Memories and Commentaries, 59) that his teacher found the work suspiciously Debussy-ist. But this is hard to take seriously, since its main influences are Russian (Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky), and its whole-tone harmonies and tritonal melodic figures standard Russianisms which reflect Rimsky-Korsakov's own contemporary usage. Rimsky-Korsakov does seem to have been disturbed by the Gorodetsky song Vesna, which Stravinsky wrote in May or June 1907, and which was sung at a Wednesday at the end of October, along with the little Pastorale. But this was mainly because he detested what he regarded as the pseudo-symbolism of the poem, as well as finding the start of the song, the first of many bell imitations in Stravinsky, frenetic and harmonically senseless (see Yastrebtsev's diary entry for 30 December 1907/12 January 1908). The static musette harmony of the Pastorale he (or Yastrebtsev) found merely strange. Certainly the main importance of these three vocal works is that they show Stravinsky beginning to make his way, however uncertainly, against the Rimsky-Korsakov tide and, in the Pastorale at least, achieving a cool, decorative poise which modestly anticipates the radical thinker of four or five years later. Meanwhile, having at last completed the revision of the symphony, Stravinsky embarked in July 1907 on a more personal orchestral project, a large-scale scherzo based on a programme derived from Maeterlinck's La vie des abeilles. Here he began to explore more freely, and without academic constraint, the fantastic qualities in Rimsky-Korsakov's late magical operas, with their glittering orchestration