[1] The Korsh Theatre opened officially on 30 August 1885 and a year later staged its first major hit, Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit.

[1] Initially, "cheap" comedies and vaudevilles (by Arkady Kryukovskoy, Dmitry Mansfeld, and Ivan Baryshev among others) dominated the theatre's repertoire, but it was on their commercial success that the Korsh Theatre built its financial independence and started producing serious work, including plays by Henrik Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann and Edmond Rostand.

Almost invariably a half-baked production staged through three or four rehearsals, they bore the atmosphere of improvisation and attracted huge public interest regardless of the quality.

The majority of such pieces were being dropped never to be returned to; some, like Charms of Love by Evtikhy Karpov or Summer Dreams by Viktor Krylov have lasted for years.

[5] The emergence in 1898 of the serious rival in the face of the Moscow Art Theatre led by Konstantin Stanislavski, worried Korsh into inviting the stage director Nikolai Sinelnikov who brought with him several aspiring talents (among them Leonid Leonidov, Alexander Ostuzhev, Maria Tamarina-Blumental, Nikolai Radin) and staged some lauded productions, including Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand, The Tempest by Shakespeare and Vanyushin's Children by Sergey Naydyonov.