The article is devoted to the complex ways of theater development in the beginning of the XX century. The article considers the creative ways of theater reformers, the search for realists and modernists, the mutual influence of symbolists and those theater figures who were realists, but were true innovators of theater art in Russia at the beginning of the XX century. The focus is on relying on the best traditions of Russian realistic art in theatrical activities. Theater figures felt the need

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... update the theater, to change the function of the Director with the emergence of the Moscow art theater; the Russian theater became a Director's theater. Keywords: renewal, searching for ways to develop the theater, realism, symbolism, Moscow art theater, emotional tension, solving aesthetic, ethics, ideological problems, avant-garde of arts, theater as a barometer of cultural life in Russia