Saint Petersburg, 1858. A group of composers known as The Five meet at Balakirev's. Young Modest Mussorgsky, both a civil servant and a musician, has become a fixture there. He tells about the first opera he plans to compose. Then he goes to the country where he discovers the lowly conditions of the peasants and the bloody conflicts with the rich land owners. He works on Gogol's 'The Marriage', trying to render into music the natural accents of the play's naturalistic dialogue. But his efforts do not pan out. On the other hand, he starts writing his opera on the story of Boris Godunov. The Marinsky Theatre refuses to stage the work. The Five, and Mussorgsky among them, are libeled and the group starts disintegrating. When 'Boris Godunov' is finally performed in 1874, it is a popular success.

Cast & crew

Grigoriy Roshal

Director

Aleksandr Borisov

Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky

Nikolai Cherkasov

Vladimir Stasov

Vladimir Balashov

Mily Balakirev

Yuri Leonidov

Alexander Borodin

Andrei Popov

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Bruno Frejndlikh

Cesar Cui

Fyodor Nikitin

Alexander Dargomyzhky

Lyubov Orlova

Yuliya Platonova

Lidiya Shtykan

Aleksandra

Valentina Ushakova

Nadezhda

Lidiya Sukharevskaya

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna

Oleksandra Vasylieva

Mussorgsky's mother

Vasili Sofronov

Dormidont Ivanovich

Konstantin Adashevsky

Rzhevsky

Lev Fenin

Kartsev

Grigoriy Shpigel

von Metz

Georgi Georgiu

Gagin

Rem Lebedev

Ilya Repin

Georgy Orlov

Osip Afanasyevich Petrov

Vladimir Taskin