[1] He requested the piece for a concert of pan-Slavonic music he had planned for May 24, 1867,[2] programming his Czech Overture on the same billing.
[1] Rimsky-Korsakov confessed in his autobiography that it was not any feeling of nationalism or pan-Slavism that prompted him to write the Fantasy, but the beauty of the themes themselves.
[1] A March 1868 review of the Fantasy by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in which he also mentioned Rimsky-Korsakov's First Symphony, found favour within the Balakirev circle.
[4] Tchaikovsky mentioned the symphony's "charming orchestration ... its structural novelty, and most of all by the freshness of its purely Russian harmonic turns ... immediately [showing] Mr. Rimsky-Korsakov to be a remarkable symphonic talent.
[5] In 1887 Rimsky-Korsakov revised the piece to prepare it for a new edition undertaken by Mitrofan Belyayev's publishing firm.