Modest Mussorgsky wrote Night on Bald Mountain and Pictures at an Exhibition — and died of delirium tremens at forty-two, in a military hospital. Repin painted his portrait a few days before the end.
He was born at Karevo, in the Pskov province, in 1839. First an army officer, then a civil servant, he belonged all the while to the Mighty Handful, wanting a Russian music that did not imitate the West.
Boris Godunov (1869, reworked in 1872) is an opera after Pushkin in which the people themselves are the protagonist, and the recitative follows the rhythms of Russian speech. Khovanshchina was left unfinished. Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano cycle inspired by Hartmann's drawings, was later orchestrated by Ravel.
After Mussorgsky's death Rimsky-Korsakov edited and "improved" his works. The originals were eventually restored.