Boris Godunov is based on the historical verse-play by the same name published by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin in 1831. Pushkin, considered the founder of modern Russian literature and Russia’s greatest poet, was raised in a cultured atmosphere by his family in Moscow. His childhood was marked by the supervision of a seemingly endless line of nurses, nannies and tutors. As was true of many Russian families in his time, the primary language spoken in the home was French, but he learned Russian from serfs in the family’s employ. With this background it is difficult to understand with any surety where his total grasp and ease with the Russian language came from, other than stating the obvious: Pushkin was a genius whose understanding of the color and intonation of the spoken word led him to revolutionize the use of the language in drama, verse and narrative.
One of the most interesting aspects of Pushkin’s life is his genealogy. On his father’s side he was descended from an ancient noble Russian family, but his maternal great-grandfather was an Ethiopian prince in the service of Peter the Great. He was fascinated by stories of Gannibal (Hannibal), his black African ancestor, and his eventual rise to the rank of general in Peter’s army. Pushkin often made reference to his own physical appearance as being more ‘African’ than ‘Russian’! Even more interesting is the fact that one of the poet’s daughters and a granddaughter both married German princes and are directly related to the Mountbatten family (Pushkin’s granddaughter Nadejda, Countess Torby, was the aunt of Prince Philip, the consort to Queen Elizabeth II).
Pushkin was greatly influenced by Shakespeare and Byron but he was at the same time greatly devoted to Russian folk tales, legends and fairy stories. As with many poets of this Romantic age he was also enamored of the Russian countryside and the lives and culture of the simple people, serfs and peasants, who populated it. At about the age of twenty he produced Ruslan and Ludmila, a fairy tale in the shape of a narrative poem which the composer Mikhail Glinka later fashioned into an opera (1842). There followed a series of imitation folk tales and legends including Rusalka (1826-32) and The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831). His verse novel, Yevgeny Onegin appeared in 1830 and was turned into an opera by Tchaikovsky in 1879. Onegin is considered the greatest of Pushkin’s works; cultured Russians can recite whole chapters of the work by memory.
The historical tragedy Boris Godunov was published in 1831 and probably written in 1825 while Pushkin was in exile at his family’s estate in Mikhailoskove. The inspiration for the play (his only drama) was found in the history plays of William Shakespeare, especially works like Richard II, Henry IV and Macbeth.
Boris was something of a Shakespearean experiment, the playwright seeking to take an extremely complicated piece of Russian political history and condense it in order to be perfectly understood by an audience. At the same time, he wanted the work to be in beautiful verse while also creating believable characters. The play was, of course, about the struggle for power over Russia, something not ever very far from the peoples’ consciousness. The work therefore had (and has!) great significance for the Russian people, a significance which was not lost on state censors in Pushkin’s time. When the author read it privately to a room full of friends, the Tsar’s secret police were eavesdropping; hence the drama went unperformed during Pushkin’s lifetime (although Tsar Nicholas I did finally relent and allow a censored version of the play to be published in 1831 as a wedding gift for Pushkin that year).
The work has a very modern sensibility and deals with such issues as the mass manipulation of public opinion for political purposes. As history, the play stays close to the (then) accepted version of events leading to Boris’ accession to the throne and eventual death. And because of the dramatic characterizations the work moves as quickly as any of its Shakespearean forebears.
Many of Pushkin’s works have been used as the basis for opera libretti: Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila, Dargomïshky’s The Stone Guest, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar Saltan, Mozart and Salieri and The Golden Cockerel, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Mazepa and The Queen of Spades, Rachmaninoff’s Aleko and Stravinsky’s Mavra. In the case of Mussorgky’s Boris, the composer used Pushkin’s play as the basis for his own libretto, in many instances keeping the original verse intact.