The article is devoted to the research of S. Beckett’s work in the context of modern history. Modernity is considered by several conceptions as a post-traumatic era, having survived an unprecedented sharp break with the past and a crisis of all cultural and existential values that received the name of nihilism in the 19th century. The various cultural phenomena of the last two centuries can be considered as possibilities for answering the challenge of nihilism. According to S. Critchley and D. Kleinberg-Levin, the works of S. Beckett are not only among the most profound comprehensions of the current situation by means of literature, but also embody the paradoxical possibility of hope for meaning in the post-religious and post-metaphysical world after the “death of God.” This hope is connected with the language itself, in which, despite its current alienated and reificated state, lives the “promise of happiness,” the non-religious redemption for the meaninglessness of existence.