[3] In 1886, after graduating from Saint Petersburg University, where he studied law, Kugel started to contribute feuilletons and theatre reviews for the newspapers Peterburgskaya Gazeta, Rus and Den, using the pseudonyms "Homo Novus", "N. Negorev" and "Kvidam".

In 1897 he started editing the magazine Театр и искусство (Teatr i Iskusstvo, literally: Theater and art), an illustrated weekly, which soon became the most influential, authoritative and intellectual publication dealing with theatre in Russia.

[5] A staunch 'starover' in all questions concerning the theatre, Kugel launched a personal crusade against 'symbolism, decadence and all manner of theatrical fable-telling', believing them to have "nothing to do with either art or [Russian] national tradition," according to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

[2] Fighting for what he saw as the 'actor's right to express his individuality on stage', he decried the 'director's dictatorship', which renders the actor "a faceless puppet, dancing to somebody else's tune,"[5] and soon became the major detractor of all the leading Russian theatre directors, most of all Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold.

[6] "Stanislavski, always tetchy about bad reviews, initially treated the critic as a personal enemy, but soon learned to value Kugel's insightful analyses of his directorial schemes and ideas, and even admire this 'useful' opponent," according to the theatre historian Inna Solovyova.

For Kugel Griboyedov's Woe from Wit was a fine pamphlet but poor material for stage production, and all of Pushkin's plays, barring Boris Godunov, while being indisputable works of genius, were 'un-stageable' and "have brought very little to the theatre.

'[3] Olga Knipper-Chekhova, engaged as Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, wrote to Chekhov: "Kugel was telling us yesterday that the play was wonderful, everybody performed fine, but not what they were supposed to.

[3] In 1908 Kugel and his wife, the actress Zinaida Kholmskaya, co-founded the False Mirror (Krivoye Zerkalo), originally a night cabaret, then, after Nikolai Evreinov's arrival as a director, a popular theatre of parodies.