Tragedy

Tragedy is a dramatic genre based on an irreconcilable, insoluble conflict of an outstanding personality with circumstances, society, or fate, usually ending in the hero's destruction; it evokes deep shock in the spectator and, according to Aristotle, catharsis — a purification through pity and fear. The genre was born in ancient Athens (Aeschylus; Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Euripides) and reached new heights in the work of William Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth) and the French Classicists Corneille and Racine. In Ukrainian literature the genre of tragedy is approached by the dramatic poems of Lesia Ukrainka (Cassandra, The Orgy), by historical drama, and by the tragic principle in the plays of Mykola Kulish (Pathetic Sonata), where the hero's personal fate is inseparable from national catastrophe.