ABSTRACT
The Moscow Art Theatre was the outcome of an eighteen-hour, nonstop, all-night session in a restaurant called “The Slavic Bazaar” in 1897 between Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, a successful playwright, and Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev, who came from a family of keen amateur actors and had made quite a reputation as a brilliant if untrained amateur actor and producer under the stage name of K. S. Stanislavsky. Actors and actresses of the Maly Theatre regarded him like Ostrovsky as their own dramatist, and chose many of his plays for their benefit nights. Muzil chose one for his first benefit after the death of Ostrovsky, whose plays he had always chosen before. At the end of the eighteen-nineties, however, on the recommendation of Yuzhin-Sumbatov, he was appointed to teach at the Philharmonic School, the only alternative in Moscow to the Imperial School. When the Society failed and was reconstructed on subscription basis, Stanislavsky became its producer, though he still worked in family business.
