During the winter of 1887, as he worked to complete Alexander Borodin's unfinished opera "Prince Igor," Rimsky-Korsakov decided to compose an orchestral piece based on pictures from "One Thousand and One Nights" as well as separate and unconnected episodes. After formulating musical sketches of his proposed work, he moved with his family to the Glinki-Mavriny dacha, in Nyezhgovitsy along the Cherementets Lake (near present-day Luga, in Leningrad Oblast). The dacha where he stayed was destroyed by the Germans during World War II.