Shall we begin with fire or water? Declan Donnellan harnesses the elements to spectacular effect in the Chekhov International Theater Festival's production of Aleksandr Pushkin's Boris Godunov, a transcendent tale of all-too-earthly power. But don't be misled into thinking that this remarkable work of theater shares anything with the wall-to-wall pyrotechnics of a stadium rock concert.

Mr. Donnellan uses flame and flood with the selective hand of an artist who understands that a single well-chosen detail sears itself into the imagination, while nonstop sound-and-light shows are merely numbing. So our introduction to fire in this latest offering from the Lincoln Center Festival 2009, which runs only through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, is of a man on a long black stage, squinting through the flames of tall liturgical candles to examine the pure face of a barefoot boy in a nightshirt, the ghost of a child he had killed.

As for water, it's hard to imagine a more richly corrupt courtship scene than the one that occurs by, and within, the tranquil pool that is discovered beneath the floorboards of the stage about halfway through the show. A man and a woman get wet, get riled and strip down to an unconditional nakedness that has nothing to do with nudity. The exposedness of both should be a sobering lesson to all people of power who expect to be loved "for themselves."

The characters flirting with the elements in the above-described scenes are infused with a lust for supreme power. The man who sees ghosts is Boris Godunov, a newly crowned Russian czar with the killing of a prince on his conscience. The couple in the water are a pretender to the Russian throne, who calls himself Dmitry, and Marina, the aristocratic Polish beauty he seeks to marry. And each of these three is invested with a singleness of purpose that lends danger to whatever they wish for.

Yet they are, in the final analysis, rather ordinary souls, people whose particular ambitions happen to connect, at the right moment, with the fantasies of a nation longing for forceful leadership. The winner has no guarantees that public favor will remain with him. On the contrary, he knows that such favor is anxious, fickle, ever-changing and ready to expose him at any moment for the fraud he knows he is.

I am hard pressed to think of a recent production that conveys with such magnificence the base humanness of those who would rule the world. This staging of Boris Godunov, written by Pushkin when he was only in his 20s, follows the colliding fortunes of its title character and a young monk who takes it upon himself to avenge the murder of the czarevich whose death allowed Boris to claim the throne.

Working with a Russian-speaking cast (with projected supertitles in English), Mr. Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod (best known as the leaders of the imaginative British company Cheek by Jowl) have retold Pushkin's story of late-16th-century imperial Russia in modern dress, with the familiar contemporary accessories of video cameras, microphones and flash-illuminated photo ops. Certainly there is nothing revolutionary in this approach: business suits and camouflage gear have become de rigueur in Shakespeare history plays.

The implicit notion here, as is often the case with such deliberately anachronistic interpretations, is that the politics of yore was politics as usual, a dirty business that changes little over the centuries. But Mr. Donnellan isn't just aiming for easy parallels between then and now. He surrounds his familiar-seeming characters, most of whom would look perfectly at home on the steps of the Kremlin today, with a sense of the mythic, of an arbitrary power called history that shapes its participants in ways they can never entirely grasp.

This is not to suggest that the leading characters in Boris Godunov are ciphers, interchangeable foot soldiers in the armies of time. On the contrary, Boris Godunov (far more than the Mussorgsky opera with which it shares a title) creates power players shaped by complex and highly individual forms of ambivalence that bring to mind Shakespeare's great aspirants to the crown: Richard III, Macbeth and the usurping Bolingbroke of Richard II.

At least that's the way the leading men of Boris Godunov come across in the extraordinary, layered performances of Aleksandr Feklistov as Boris and Yevgeny Mironov as Grigory, the runaway monk who leads a revolution by posing as the rightful heir to the throne. In his boxy business suits, the burly Mr. Feklistov brings to mind a composite of Soviet leaders in the pre-perestroika years, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev.

He is a smiling man of bull-like physicality, who picks people up and tosses them about as if they were rag dolls. Working a crowd in a state procession, he exudes a harsh joviality that is scarier than any forbidding frown. The dyspeptic spasms that cross his face suggest that fear – of past deeds, of rivals, of the waywardness of the people he rules, whose voices regularly sound in acclaim and dissent from actors positioned among the audience – never leaves this man who would be fearless.

In his evolution from cowering monk to charismatic rebel, Mr. Mironov keeps us aware of the shaky pretender beneath the pose. Grigory has a physical defect – one arm is shorter than the other – and you can gauge his degree of confidence by noting how conscious he is of that arm. In moments of uncertainty, such awareness all but cripples him. And in the gorgeous fountain-side scene in which he woos Marina (the uncanny Irina Grineva), Mr. Mironov seems to sort through an entire lifetime of doubts.

Grigory's final victory over those doubts is, like all victories in Boris Godunov, provisional. From the very beginning Mr. Donnellan has presented the fight for the crown within a frame of liturgical ceremony, with phalanxes of Russian Orthodox priests and monks who chant and move in stately procession. Though it becomes clear that many of these men of God are just as worldly as warriors and politicians, they also represent a detachment from things worldly that even the play's most ambitious characters ultimately aspire to.

In an early scene in which we first see Grigory, he is serving an old monk (Igor Yasulovich), who records the history of his time by candlelight, striving to see the pattern that emerges from the chaos of conflict. Throughout the play, people will speak of yearning for a god's-eye view in the muddle of battle. Of course, those in the thick of the struggle can't have it both ways.

But a resourceful artist like Mr. Donnellan can, allowing us a sharp, rare double vision – of visceral intimacy and cosmic distance – that elicits a genuine greatness in Pushkin's play that its characters could never hope for.