Grotesque

The grotesque is a type of artistic imagery based on a fantastic, distorted, excessive combination of the incompatible — the real and the fantastic, the terrible and the funny, the high and the low, the living and the mechanical. The grotesque hyperbolizes and deforms reality, violating natural proportions in order to reveal its hidden essence or absurdity. The name derives from the 'grottoes' — antique wall paintings with a bizarre interweaving of plants, animals, and humans. The theory of the grotesque was developed by Wolfgang Kayser (the grotesque as an 'estranged world') and Mikhail Bakhtin (the carnival, renewing 'grotesque realism'). Classic masters of the grotesque are François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka. In Ukrainian literature, the grotesque is a characteristic means of satire and 'chimerical prose': it is vivid in the drama of Mykola Kulish ('The People's Malakhii') and the prose of Ostap Vyshnia.