Abstract. A huge amount of research has been written about the legacy of K. S. Stanislavsky (1863-1938) - and this was done mainly during the Soviet period. Today, his legacy is increasingly viewed as «problematic» - subjected to Soviet ideologization, mass unification of theaters under the Moscow Art Theater, which took place, but could not distort the essence of the creative search for a theatrical classic. And the «Stanislavsky system» itself is declared today at best «incomplete», in which the modern theater can not find anything significant for itself. On the other hand, the «new heirs», who wrote the name of Stanislavsky on their banners, demonstrate an extreme lack of understanding of the essence of his creative tasks. The peculiarity of our research is that we tried for the first time in the history of the theater to show the deep connection of the search for K. S. Stanislavsky with the questions about the nature and essence of creativity that were solved by the classics of Russian philosophy – Apollo Grigoriev and Nikolai Strakhov. Without such an approach, without a correct philosophical formulation of questions, it is impossible to answer why the «life of the human spirit «is the center and essence of the «Stanislavsky system».

Key words: Moscow Art Theater, Russian Theater, Stanislavsky, nature of creativity, Grigoriev, Strakhov, Russian philosophy