 Throughout history, members of the family served in Russian government and took various positions as governors and war generals.Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov was famously a lover of Catherine the Great.The father of the composer, Andrei Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov (1784–1862), was one of the six illegitimate sons of Avdotya Yakovlevna, daughter of a simple Orthodox priest from Pskov, and lieutenant general Peter Voinovich Rimsky-Korsakov who had to officially adopt his own children as he couldn't marry their mother because of her lower social status.