Known for its fair which was held five times a year under the Russian Empire, the small village of Velyki Sorochintsi – located in Central Ukraine, south east of Kiev – was made famous by Nikolai Gogol’s opening story, Sorochintsi Fair, in his folk-tale collection Evenings on a Farm near Dinkanka. In 1874 the great innovator of Russian music, Modest Mussorgsky, set to work on fashioning a comic opera from this material. Composition proved rather haphazard, however, and by the time of Mussorgsky’s death only about half of the work was drafted or complete in piano-vocal score form.