A Life for the Tsar (Russian: Жизнь за царя, romanized: Zhizn za tsarya listenⓘ) is a "patriotic-heroic tragic" opera in four acts with an epilogue by Mikhail Glinka.

The original Russian libretto, based on historical events, was written by Nestor Kukolnik, Egor Fyodorovich (von) Rozen, Vladimir Sollogub and Vasily Zhukovsky.

[1] The plot of A Life for the Tsar had been used earlier in 1815, when Catterino Cavos, an Italian-Russian composer, had written a two-act singspiel with the same subject and title.

A Life for the Tsar occupies an important position in Russian musical theater as the first native opera to win a permanent place in the repertoire.

The opera was given its premiere performance on 27 November 1836 in Saint Petersburg conducted by Catterino Cavos with set designs by Andreas Roller.

The image of the seventeenth-century peasant features prominently at the bottom of the Romanov Monument in Kostroma, where a female personification of Russia gives blessings to a kneeling Susanin.

[4] In keeping with Glinka's European training, much of A Life for the Tsar was structured according to conventional Italian and French models of the period.

After some unsuccessful attempts were made to remedy this situation, in 1939 the poet S. M. Gorodetsky rewrote the text to remove references to the Tsar and otherwise make the libretto politically palatable.

[5] The village of Domnino Antonida is eager to marry Sobinin, but her father, Susanin, refuses permission until a Russian has been duly chosen to take the tsar's throne.

Susanin blesses Sobinin and Antonida on their upcoming wedding when a detachment of Polish soldiers bursts in to demand the tsar's whereabouts.

When night falls, in a part of the forest near a monastery, Vanya knocks at the gates and alerts the inhabitants to spirit the tsar away.