 The composer first applied Afanasyev's ideas in "May Night", in which he helped fill out Gogol's story by using folk dances and calendar songs.He went further down this path in "The Snow Maiden", where he made extensive use of seasonal calendar songs and "khorovodi" (ceremonial dances) in the folk tradition.Musicologists and Slavicists have long recognized that Rimsky-Korsakov was an ecumenical artist whose folklore-inspired operas take up such issues as the relationship between paganism and Christianity and the seventeenth-century schism in the Orthodox Church.