About the work
Historical tragedy in five acts by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, written in 1868–69 and published in March 1870 in the journal "Vestnik Evropy." Censors approved the play with minor cuts in April 1870, but the directorate of the Imperial Theatres refused to stage it; it was not premiered until 1881, six years after Tolstoy's death, at the private Pushkin Theatre of Moscow theatre director Anna Brenko.
Plot
Tsar Boris Godunov, who once secured the throne against all resistance, now rules haunted by guilt and suspicion, while famine and the nobility's mistrust undermine his authority. As rumours spread of a tsarevich who supposedly survived, the threats to Boris's power multiply from every side. In the end the tsar collapses under the weight of his guilt and the conspiracies closing in on him.
Cultural significance
As the concluding part of the trilogy on Russia's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century succession of tsars, "Tsar Boris" paints a deliberately critical picture of tsarist power; that this third part reached the stage only a decade after censors had cleared it, and then only at a private Moscow theatre, shows how much the Imperial Theatres themselves shied away from an open depiction of deadly court intrigue.