It was in this decade that some of the most familiar Russian operas (Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin) came to the stage. The Maid of Pskov, Boris Godunov and The Oprichnik all mine the same vein: that of opera on a historical subject, with ample scope for evocation of couleur locale in song, instrumental music, dance, costume and sets, albeit with intimate personal relationships intertwined with the powerful thread of political conflict. If this scheme owes something to A Life for the Tsar, it owes more to grand opéra with its interweaving of private passion with religious or political clashes and ready exploitation of imposing spectacle. What is distinctive, however, is the Russians' attempt to deal with their own nation's past and to do so (at least in the first two cases) while creating a more continuous, more dramatically flowing texture unimpeded by the conventional division of the music into sections of recitative, arioso, ensemble etc. The New Russian School made its mark with The Maid of Pskov and Boris Godunov. These works are examined in Richard Taruskin: ‘“The Present in the Past”: Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, ca. 1870’ in Malcolm H. Brown (ed.): Russian and Soviet Music – Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor, Michigan 1984), pp. 77–146.

A quite different vein is mined in Eugene Onegin.

(a) Ts. A. Cui: Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Maid of Pskov. St Petersburg Bulletin, 9 January 1873, no 9. Cui, pp. 215–24

This notice contains a substantial exposition of the operatic theory of the New Russian Operatic School (for instance, on the question of when folksongs may appropriately be used and when not). […]