Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz draws differences between Western and Eastern European absurdism, points out similarities and adjacencies, and emphasises the function fulfilled by the theatre of the absurd in Eastern Europe: the representation of the drama of a man deprived of freedom. The author of this important book shows absurdity in the dramas of the 1980s at the end of the Soviet bloc as the only possibility of dramatic-theatrical embodiment of realism, as a metaphor for reality.