In 1901 she enrolled in the just opened Moscow Art Theatre Drama School and a year later joined the MAT troupe, as Maria Germanova.

She debuted in 1903 in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, then garnered positive reviews as Elena in Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun (1905), Sofya in Griboyedov's Woe from Wit and Agnes in Henrik Ibsen's Brand (both 1906).

"The physical beauty, the reverberating nerve beat, the sharp perceptiveness" (according to the biographer Inna Solovyova) as well as her love of modernism ('decadent' was also the word that has been used to describe her close circle of friends) made Germanova one of the rising stars of the early 1900s' Russian theatre scene, and "a promising tragic actress in the vein of Duse".

[1] In 1914–1924 Germanova starred in five Russian silent films, starting with Anna Karenina in 1914, directed by Vladimir Gardin and produced by Paul Timan.

Her repertoire now included also the parts of Ranevskaya (Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard), the Queen (The King of the Dark Chamber by Rabindranath Tagore), Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea by Ibsen), Katerina (The Storm by Alexander Ostrovsky) and Medea by Euripides.