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Kuchka (The Mighty Handful), a group of young
composers (Balakirev, Cui,
MUSSORGSKY
, Borodin,
and Rimsky-Korsakov) who went on to create a
distinct national Russian school of music. Bal-
akirev edited and published Glinka's works after
his death.
czar. As Godunov relied on the minor gentry in
his ongoing attempt to consolidate the autoc-
racy, he antagonized many of the prominent
Muscovite boyar families who had suffered
heavily under Ivan IV. Increasing peasant dis-
content and famine contributed to the period of
social breakdown known as the Time of Trou-
bles, which historians traditionally date from
1598 to 1613. As opposition to his rule grew,
many boyars turned their support to an impos-
tor who claimed to be the real Dmitrii of Uglich
who had escaped Godunov's attempted assassi-
nation, hence the name
FALSE DMITRII
. With the
support of Polish and Lithuanian nobles, False
Dmitrii invaded Muscovy in 1604. Godunov was
on the verge of defeating False Dmitrii when he
died unexpectedly in April 1605, leaving his wife
and young son,
FEODOR II
, to rule over a pro-
foundly divided Muscovite state. Feodor reigned
for only a few months but was killed with his
mother, as False Dmitrii entered Moscow in
June 1605 and was crowned czar. The events of
Boris Godunov's life and, most notably, the lin-
gering suspicions over his role in the death of
Dmitrii of Uglich cast him—unfairly—for future
generations in the tragic role of a Russian ver-
sion of Shakespeare's Richard III.
Godunov, Boris Feodorovich
(1552?-1605)
czar
Czar of Russia during the first part of the early-
17th-century
TIME OF TROUBLES
, Godunov led a
life that became the subject of a well-known
tragedy by Aleksandr
PUSHKIN
, later made into
an opera by Modest
MUSSORGSKY
. Born to a pro-
minent boyar family of Tatar origin, Godunov
was educated at the court of
IVAN IV
. His fortunes
benefited from his marriage to the daughter of
Maliuta Skuratov, the head of Ivan's
oprichnina,
which he also joined, and from his sister's mar-
riage to Ivan's feeble son, the future
FEODOR I
.
After Ivan IV's death in 1584, Godunov gradu-
ally outmaneuvered his main competitors for
influence over the new czar, the Mstislavskii,
Shuiskii, and Romanov families, and concen-
trated power in his hands as regent. As regent,
Godunov was universally recognized as a skillful
statesman who advanced Russia's territorial
interests in the west toward the Baltic, in the
southern steppes, and in promoting a more
energetic attempt to colonize Siberia in the east.
He was also instrumental in obtaining the agree-
ment of the patriarch of Constantinople in 1598
for the establishment of a separate Russian
PATRI
-
ARCHATE
, thus enhancing the status of the Rus-
sian Church. Under Godunov's regency, the legal
status of serfdom was further guaranteed by an
edict of 1587 that bound serfs to the land. In
1591, the 10-year old prince Dmitrii of Uglich,
Ivan's youngest son and possible heir to the
throne, died under highly mysterious circum-
stances. Godunov was never able to dispel the
suspicions that he was responsible for Dmitrii's
death. Nevertheless, when Feodor died childless
in 1598, the Assembly of the Land chose him as
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich
(1809-1852)
writer
One of the masters of 19th-century Russian liter-
ature, Gogol eluded easy classification from his
contemporaries and later generations of readers.
Of Ukrainian origin, Gogol arrived in St. Peters-
burg in 1829, and after a short stint in the civil
service, he became a private tutor. By 1831 he
had become part of the elite literary world inhab-
ited by
PUSHKIN
and the critic Vissarion
BELINSKY
.
His early stories and sketches of Ukrainian life,
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Arabesques,
and
Mirgorod,
were well received for their novelty and
ability to capture rural life. Larger success and
acclaim came with the play
The Government Inspec-
tor
(1836), a satire of provincial bureaucrats. He
spent the next decade abroad, mostly in Rome,
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