Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy is a dramatic genre that combines features of tragedy and comedy: a serious, at times tragic conflict is revealed together with the comic, and the ending offers no unambiguous verdict — the sorrowful is interwoven with the laughable, as in life itself. Tragicomedy renounces a clear division into the high and the low, showing the complexity and contradictoriness of reality. The genre has ancient roots (the Roman Plautus used the term itself), developed in the Baroque era, and especially in the twentieth century — in the 'theatre of the absurd' of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, and in the plays of Anton Chekhov, which the author called comedies although they are imbued with drama. In Ukrainian literature the tragicomic principle marks the dramaturgy of Mykola Kulish and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, as well as modern drama, where everyday grotesque borders on existential drama.