The paper discusses the Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky's production of Modest Mussorgsky's 1872-1874 opera Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera House in London in 1983. The production, which has become legendary, is, among other things, the director's statement of his aesthetic convictions, just as Alexander Pushkin's Romantic tragedy and Mussorgsky's realist opera were expressions of their understanding of art's nature and purpose. The production took place between Tarkovksy's last two films,

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... Nostalgia (1983) and Sacrifice (1986), both focusing on the role of the artist in the contemporary world. Such a framing highlights the same thread in the opera: a meditation simultaneously on history and on art. Tarkovsky's philosophical sensibility readily resonates with the Pushkinian poetic tradition. What in its centre, yet again, is the artist's concern with truth as it reveals itself in art.