Pavel Chesnokov -Pavel Tsjesnokov- (12/10/1877 - 14/03/1944), a Russian composer. He was born near Moscow, to the family of hereditary Russian precentors who lived near Moscow. Graduating from the Moscow school of church music in 1895, he then apprenticed with the prominent composer Sergei Taneyev who was then director of the Moscow Conservatory. Sergei Taneyev went down in the history of Russian music as an unsurpassed expert in polyphonic arrangements for choirs, an expertise which he generously shared with the young Pavel Chesnokov.
Chesnokov was a great polyphonist. The thing is that the Russian church music, the way it exists now, is essentially polyphonic. Polyphonic arrangements became part of the Russian church music back in the 17th century. Before that, for six centuries since Russia went Christian in the year 988, monophonic music ruled supreme, just like Christianity itself, emulated from Byzantium.