<P> Realism began earlier in the 19th century in Russia than elsewhere in Europe and took a more uncompromising form . Beginning with the plays of Ivan Turgenev (who used "domestic detail to reveal inner turmoil"), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (who was Russia's first professional playwright), Aleksey Pisemsky (whose A Bitter Fate (1859) anticipated Naturalism), and Leo Tolstoy (whose The Power of Darkness (1886) is "one of the most effective of naturalistic plays"), a tradition of psychological realism in Russia culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich - Danchenko . </P> <P> Ostrovsky is often credited with creating a peculiarly Russian drama . His plays Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (1868) and The Storm (1859) draw on the life that he knew best, that of the middle class . Other important Russian playwrights of the 19th century include Alexander Sukhovo - Kobylin and Mikhail Saltikov - Shchedrin . </P> <P> Naturalism, a theatrical movement born out of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and contemporary political and economic conditions, found its main proponent in Émile Zola . His essay "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) argued that poetry is everywhere instead of in the past or abstraction: "There is more poetry in the little apartment of a bourgeois than in all the empty worm - eaten palaces of history ." </P> <P> The realisation of Zola's ideas was hindered by a lack of capable dramatists writing naturalist drama . André Antoine emerged in the 1880s with his Théâtre Libre that was only open to members and therefore was exempt from censorship . He quickly won the approval of Zola and began to stage Naturalistic works and other foreign realistic pieces . Antoine was unique in his set design as he built sets with the "fourth wall" intact, only deciding which wall to remove later . The most important French playwrights of this period were given first hearing by Antoine including Georges Porto - Riche, François de Curel, and Eugène Brieux . </P>

Which literary movement at the end of the nineteenth century helped shape american theater modernism