French theatre pioneer André Antoine staged "La Puissance des Ténèbres"—a French translation of the play, by Pavlovsky and Oscar Méténier—in Paris at the Théâtre Montparnasse on 10 February 1888 to great acclaim. Constantin Stanislavski, the Russian theatre practitioner, had wanted to stage the play in 1895; he had persuaded Tolstoy to rewrite act four along lines that Stanislavski had suggested, but the production did not materialise. He eventually staged it with his Moscow Art Theatre in 1902. That production opened on 5 December and enjoyed some success. Stanislavski, however, was scathingly critical, particularly of his own performance as Mitrich. Years later, in his autobiography "My Life in Art", he wrote: