Sadko

Two things this record deliberately does not say, both of which the popular accounts do. The sea princess Volkhova, who falls in love with Sadko and dissolves into the river that bears her name, and Lyubava, the wife he leaves in Novgorod, are Rimsky-Korsakov's opera of 1898 and not the bylina; the epic gives the Sea Tsar a daughter to be married to but nothing like that plot. And no relation is recorded to the Sea Tsar, because the Sea Tsar is not in this corpus and this batch does not add him — a Novgorodian sea-lord known only from this one cycle needs a census pass of his own. Sadko carries a verified-solitary verdict instead. He is also the reason this batch does not treat 'bylina hero' as one thing: he belongs to the Novgorod merchant cycle, which has a different subject matter, a different politics and a different hero from the Kiev cycle the registry's three bogatyrs come from.

Domains

• music
• seafaring and trade

Sources

• Reference treatments of the Sadko bylina and of the Novgorodian cycle.