Giuseppe Verdi's Otello and Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov are two of opera's greatest tragic heroes, and both have seriously flawed personalities. Otello is based on the protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedy, and murders his wife before killing himself: psychiatry names the ‘Othello Syndrome’, or ‘morbid jealousy’, after him. Tsar Boris is based on the protagonist of Pushkin's historical drama, and murders the Tsarevitch Dmitri in order to obtain the succession; he could be described as a psychopathic, blood-stained tyrant. These two powerful operas were premiered within thirteen years of each other: Boris Godunov in 1874 in St Petersburg and Otello in 1887 in Milan. They merit a study to themselves.

Since both men are leaders and statesmen, it is interesting to speculate whether there is a correlation between senior political figures and abnormal behaviour. In his ‘Creativity and Psychopathology’ of 1994, Felix Post takes a group of 46 nineteenth- and twentieth-century politicians, and finds that 59% had ‘marked’ or ‘severely abnormal’ psychopathology compared with a figure of between 8-13% in the general population. Lord David Owen, a medically-trained former political leader, has written a book about physical and mental illness in heads of government over the past 100 years, and has also contributed an article on the topic to the Journal of Neurology. Of US Presidents between 1776 and 1974, he finds that 18 (49%) ‘met criteria suggesting psychiatric disorder’. He also points out that the ‘megalomania’ he finds in certain heads of state would now be called ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. This may be a consequence of holding a responsible high office, as if there was ‘something feeding the brain, creating what I call Hubris [insolent/ fatal pride] Syndrome’.

The question for us is whether the morbidly jealous Otello has a narcissistic disorder, and the bloodily psychopathic Boris an antisocial/ dissocial (psychopathic) one. The traits belong together, since antisocial/ dissocial, borderline, histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders make up the Cluster B group of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Diseases (DSM-IV: the three clusters A, B and C are described in section (e) of the Appendix).