After Prokofiev's return to the Soviet Union in 1935 - 1936, he eagerly utilized the newfound inspiration his homeland gave him by turning out work after work, from his ballet Romeo and Juliet and a number of "mass songs," to Peter and the Wolf and his film score Alexander Nevsky. During this same period, he was commissioned to produce scores for several important productions to mark the approaching centennial of the death of the Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837). In 1936 he wrote music for the projected film, The Queen of Spades, and for the stage dramas Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov. All three productions, however, were canceled because Soviet censors saw "formalism" (the sin of being too "Western" or "bourgeois") in the work of the directors. Prokofiev apparently completed only Boris Godunov: Onegin and The Queen of Spades were probably nearly finished, but the former existed only in piano score and the latter was not completely orchestrated. The composer, however, did reuse much of the music from all three efforts.

Boris Godunov has apparently never been performed as a work on its own, and only one of its numbers, "The Fountain Scene," had ever been recorded in the twentieth century. Prokofiev reused the polonaise from this section in his film score for Ivan the Terrible, Op. 116. He also salvaged a dark-sounding battle theme to depict the German invasion in his opera Semyon Kotko (1939). Other compositions reportedly contain some of Godunov's music, as well. Boris Godunov is thus a work that is probably more important for its offshoots than as an entity itself.

© Robert Cummings, All Music Guide