Boris Godunov

<p>The tale of Boris Godunov--tsar usurper tsarecide--dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin in drama by Alexander Pushkin and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning European models: German historiography French melodrama and Italian opera. Within a Bakhtinian framework Caryl Emerson explores these three versions of the Boris Tale the context of their genesis and their complex interrelationships.</p>