The central character of the play, Fedor Protasov, is tormented by the belief that his wife Liza has never really chosen between him and the more conventional Victor Karenin, a rival for her hand.

He shows up in court to testify that she had no way of knowing that he was alive; when the judge rules that his wife must either give up her new husband or be exiled to Siberia, Protasov shoots himself.

The play received its English-language premiere in London on 6 December 1912, under the title The Man Who Was Dead (a translation by Z. Vengerova and John Pollock), in a production by the Literary Theatre Society.

[6] Its first performance in the United States was a Yiddish-language production in New York, produced by and starring Jacob Adler, in a translation by Leon Kobrin.

Several days beforehand, the New York Times ran an extensive piece on the play by Herman Bernstein, with a synopsis so thorough as almost to amount to an English translation.

The production, which ran for four months, has been credited with reviving the fortunes of serious Yiddish-language theater in New York, after a period of about six years in which lighter fare had dominated.