piece that the piano part was over-dominant. Lyatoshynsky's family decided to ask the composer Reinhold Glière, then the director and professor of the newly opened Kyiv Conservatory (now the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of Ukraine), to teach the young man composition. His mother brought Glière the score of the quartet, and Glière agreed to teach him. A postcard has survived which reads: “I invite His Excellency Mr. Borys Lyatoshynsky to my first lesson. Professor Glier." Lyatoshynsky's early musical style was influenced by his family, his teachers, and his future wife Margarita Tsarevich—in his letters to her written between 1914 and 1916, his first ideas about writing music are revealed. Lyatoshynsky enrolled at the Conservatory as a student. He graduated from the university in 1918. After graduating from the Conservatory the following year, he was employed there as a music composition teacher. During his student years, he composed his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 1 (1915), and his Symphony No. 1, Op. 2 (19181919, revised in 1967). According to the musicologists Igor Savchuk and Tatiana Gomon, perhaps the most tragic of his early piano works is "Mourning Prelude", a transitional work and one of his most powerful, which was written on 19 December 1920, the day his father died of typhus. During this early period of Lyatoshynsky's development as a composer, he drew inspiration from works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and Alexander Scriabin. Many young composers of the Russian Empire similarly regarded Scriabin's experiments as a turning point in music. Lyatoshynsky's Piano Trio No.1 (1922) for violin, cello, and piano, is a work that attempts to have greater dynamic content and complexity; its sections are more contrasting than in previous works. Career at the Kyiv Conservatory From 1922 to 1925, Lyatoshynsky, then a 25-year-old lecturer and teacher of composition in the Kyiv Conservatory, organised and led the . He was appointed as professor of composition in 1935. During the 1920s, the Communists introduced a policy of korenizatsiya ('growing roots'), designed to foster indigenous cultures as a way to undermine what was perceived as imperial domination. Korenizatsia produced a cultural climate that encouraged Lyatoshynsky and his contemporaries to be experimental and innovative. During the first half of the decade, Lyatoshynsky concentrated mainly on composing chamber music for the violin and the piano, writing pieces such as his String Quartet No 2, the Trio for piano, violin and cello, and