The Moscow Art Theatre (Russian: Московский Художественный академический театр, МХАТ; Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr, МHАТ) is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time.