Offering a close reading of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina, “Music—Word—Drama” explores the ways these plays have modified the “evolution line” of drama in the Western tradition. He illuminates the genre of chronicle plays in terms of poetical structure and composition. Russian dramatic chronicles, never before discussed as one corpus, are integrated in a concept of genre poetics. A full biblio- & musicography is provided at the end of the book.