Stanislavsky’s artistic development is tracked in its various phases during the years preceding the 1917 Revolution and according to his strongest affinities and the most important influences that he absorbed into his guiding principles for the Moscow Art Theatre. Attention is focused on Abramtsevo, the artistic colony and utopian community founded by Savva Mamontov, a family friend and significant part of the habitus that shaped Stanislavsky’s cultural attitudes and tastes. It is at Abramtsevo and also at Mamontov’s Private Opera Theatre in Moscow that Stanislavsky saw communal artistic aspirations in action and how leading visual artists, composers and singers, notably Chaliapin, combined their different talents and skills, providing him with reference points for his ensemble theatre and its aim for harmoniously integrated productions.

Related inspiration to do with Old Believer Orthodoxy and its values, Tolstoy’s beliefs, Sulerzhitsky’s Tolstoyan perspectives, Vrubel’s mystical paintings and Scriabin’s ecstatic music, along with numerous other experiences of the Russian Silver Age, not least Mikhaïl Chekhov’s stage experiments, contextualize and illuminate Stanislavsky’s theatre work in its fullest sense. Sociopolitical factors similarly situate Stanislavsky’s endeavours in the first ‘half’ of his life in art.

The Russian avant-garde arose in an age of advertising, publicity, and celebrity culture. Across the world, advances in photography, film, and print were feeding images and ideas to publics fascinated by wealth and consumption. In St. Petersburg and Moscow no less than in the other capitals of Europe, artists, writers, and performers catered to new appetites for fashion and display. The juxtaposition of publicity and art implied a radical departure from the traditionally passive role of the audience, since publicity requires the participation of the audience. Increasingly, Russian culture was commodified. Images of literary giants appeared on candy wrappers and cigarette boxes; in cheap lithographs; and then in photographs reproduced on postcards, some carrying advertising on the back. The women of Russia’s cultural circles pursued increased agency and rose to fame in the exaggerated empowerment that was part of celebrity culture. The avant-garde of both sexes courted celebrity and adopted a spirit of playfulness as they abandoned figurative forms for abstraction. They challenged conventional ideas and brought a new force – humor – to the interplay between artist and audience. In so doing, they drew on a vein of comedy that existed in both the sacred and secular traditions.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.