At the time of his death, Stanislavsky considered Nikolai Demidov to be 'his only student, who understands the System'. Demidov's incredibly forward-thinking processes not only continued his teacher's pioneering work, but also solved the problems of an actor's creativity that Stanislavsky never conquered. Despite being one of the original teachers of the Stanislavski system, Demidov's name was little known either in his native Russia or the wider world until the turn of the 21st Century. Since then, his extensive works have been published in Russian but are yet to find their way to the English-speaking world. Amongst actors, there are many who have become accustomed to filtering their every step onstage through their consciousness. They can't imagine how anything could happen on its own. The difference is only that in life, there is a certain force of their individual being that acts on its own.