Product Overview
Although The Old Man has been performed only rarely and The Counterfeit Coin has not even been translated into English until now, both works are deservingof far more attention than they have received. Here, Gorky moves beyond the social themes that predominate in his earlier plays to probe deeply into such matters as what constitutes justice, whether one individual has the right to judge another, the clash between reality and illusion, and the difficulty of distinguishing the false from the genuine. As Barry Scherr notes in his wide-ranging introduction, this is a Gorky for whom Ibsen has become more of a presence, who not only polemicizes with Dostoevsky but cannot escape his influence, and who, by the mid-1920s, has absorbed lessons from Pirandello.
