Beckett’s Dystopian Trilogy, Part I: The Irrelevance of Godot

The article concentrates on a variety of textual alterations introduced to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot either in the process of translation by the author or by the third parties. In a close reading of these changes the article follows the philosophy of human degradation and connects it both with Beckett’s own ideas on the matter and with a broad cultural context of the epoch. Apart from this philological and cultural analysis, the article advances a thesis that the main theme of Beckett play is not necessarily the absence of Godot/God, or a figure of authority, but the fact of humanity slowly descending into stagnation, depletion of energy and hope as well as physical deprivation. Therefore the article offers an interesting study of Beckett from textual and cultural perspectives, but it also makes a contribution to the genetic criticism of his oeuvre.