Boris Godunov

For a long time, my understanding of Boris Godunov was shaped by a few things I had learned at school and by the image created by Pushkin. When I began researching his biography, the person I gradually discovered proved to be far more complex than the way he had been preserved in cultural memory. I was struck by how an artistic representation can prove more enduring than historical knowledge, shaping our perception of a person centuries later.

I travelled to places connected with Godunov in search of surviving traces of his time. It was important to me not to reconstruct anything or introduce anything into the frame, but to photograph only what exists today. Yet few material traces remained: much had been destroyed, rebuilt, or lost.

I used the gum-oil printing process to remove details of the present from the image, leaving only the essential core of the photographed object. Rather than reconstructing the past, I tried to visually enter another time through what little of it has survived into the present.

2023-2025. Photography, gum-oil printing.

Image captions:

 

Riza for Andrei Rublev’s icon The Holy Trinity. Moscow, 16th–18th centuries. Gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones. Donations by Boris Godunov and Mikhail Romanov to the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.

Archaeological finds from Bolshiye Vyazemy. A fragment of flooring from the basement of Boris Godunov’s palace, spruce logs beneath the Stable Yard, and fragments of domestic pottery dating from the late 16th to early 17th century.

Godunov family burial vault. Ipatiev Monastery, Kostroma. Fourteen burials survive in the basement of the Trinity Cathedral. Another 38 were lost during the reconstruction of the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in the 1760s.

Godunov family burial vault. Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, Sergiev Posad. Erected in 1782, almost two centuries after the Time of Troubles.

Fragment of a fresco from the Trinity Cathedral of the Ipatiev Monastery. Kostroma.

Smolensk Fortress Wall. Construction of the new stone fortress began in 1595 on the initiative of Boris Godunov. Seventeen of its original 38 towers survive today.

The Lamb. Fragment of a fresco in the Church of St. Demetrius on the Blood. Uglich, 1772. The church was built on the site of the death of Tsarevich Dmitry, whose murder Boris Godunov was later accused of orchestrating.

Ipatiev Monastery. Kostroma. Its flourishing in the late 16th century was closely connected with the patronage of the Godunov family.

Epitaphios The Entombment of Christ. Donated to the Ipatiev Monastery by Tsaritsa Irina Godunova in 1593.

Godunov Ravine. Bolshiye Vyazemy. Part of the defensive structures of the Vyazemy settlement created during the time of Boris Godunov.

Shirt of Tsar Feodor Borisovich Godunov. Late 16th–early 17th century. Discovered during the opening of the Godunov family burial vault near the Dormition Cathedral of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.

Church of St. Demetrius on the Blood. Uglich. Built in 1692 on the site where Tsarevich Dmitry of Uglich died on 15 May 1591.

Tree growing on the site of the former village of Borisovo, once an estate of Boris Godunov.

Smolensk Fortress Wall. Built in 1596–1602 during the reign of Tsar Feodor I and Boris Godunov.