Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II The World's First Theatre CONSTANTIN SERGEIEVITCH ALEXEIEFF read1ed OUt a large warm hand and his furrowed face broke into a cordial smile, as my Moscow host, himself a man of fine tastes and keen pride in the Russian theatre, started to introduce me in the little dressing room to the rear of the stage of the Art Theatre. My letters had preceded me, — letters telling how I had come all the way from America into the shadow of the Terror just to sit in the playhouses of Moscow and Petrograd and carry back to my own country a brand of inspiration from their defiant beauty. As the name in the letters and the name from the lips of my host flashed their identity across the mind of the artist, I felt the thrill of suddenly increased pressure on my hand, the smile vanished from his face and tears came into his eyes. For seventeen thousand miles I had persisted on my errand, relying on my own faith, a blind fai,th which I could hardly analyze. Now I was face to face with an answering faith. I knew why I had come, and the knowledge of my responsibility almost overwhelmed me. It was thus that I met Stanislavsky, president of thecouncil and first artist of the world's first theatre. Alexeieff he is in life, but all Russia and the world know him by his stage name, Stanislavsky. All Russia knows him, and his name and his influence are written all over the record of the Russian theatre of the last two decades. Under the iron-gray soldierly guise of Vershinin, the reserved but sensitive lieutenant colonel in Tche- hoff's " The Three Sisters ", I first saw him that evening of the day the theatre reopened after the Bolshevik Revolution. In the afternoon " The Blue Bird " had cast its spell over me and I had yielded to Stanislavsky, producer, — the master artist of the active mo...