Modest Mussorgsky’s opera set during Russia’s Time of Troubles and featuring the Polish princess Marina is Boris Godunov.
The opera centers on Boris Godunov, who becomes tsar after the death of Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitry. Its plot draws on Alexander Pushkin’s historical drama and Nikolay Karamzin’s History of the Russian State. Marina Mniszech, a Polish noblewoman, becomes involved with the pretender Grigory Otrepyev, who claims to be the surviving Dmitry.
Mussorgsky created more than one version of the opera. The original seven-scene version was completed in 1869 but rejected by the Imperial Theatres. He revised it, adding scenes and changing the structure; the revised version was first performed in Saint Petersburg in 1874.
The opera is known for its powerful portrayal of crowds, political uncertainty, and Boris’s psychological burden. It is sometimes confused with Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, which concerns a later seventeenth-century political crisis and different historical figures.