Of particular interest in the dining room are the portraits of Rimsky-Korsakov's forebears, painted by unknown artists in the 18th to early 19th centuries. The composer belonged to an ancient noble family descended from Ventseslav Korsak, who came to Russia from Lithuania and whose progeny later russified their surname to ‘Korsakov’. In 1677 Tsar Fyodor Alekseyevich allowed a number of Korsakovs the highest concession of adding the prefix ‘Rimsky’ (meaning ‘Roman’ in Russian) to their surname, on the basis that their ancient forebears had been subjects of the Roman state. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov belonged to the fourteenth generation descended from Ventseslav Korsak and was the sixth descendant of the original Rimsky-Korsakov.
