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The British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most extraordinary modern playwrights, with the writing career which spanned over fifty years. The world Pinter depicts in his dramas is deeply political, violent, malevolent, and absurd at the same time, and is certainly reflective of dread, the precarious condition inhabited by most of contemporary humanity. A whole gallery of Pinter's characters (in his early plays) are not driven by ambition to make progress in such a world, they don't care to dispute the public arena, they are uninterested in changing the world for better or for worse. On the contrary, those characters are sad citizens of intimacy, fear, the horrific nature of which unmasks itself in claustrophobic rooms they are entrapped in, where power games, domination, and the struggle for liberation originate. Pinter's characters are obsessed only with their own survival, governed by the 'territorial imperative'. The paper aims at analyzing thematic preoccupations, dramatic devices and major dramatic and poetic elements of Pinter's plays, with the emphasis on his connection with the 'Theatre of the Absurd'. The focus is also on the concept of the hidden violence of language and linguistic absurdity as used by Pinter.