Abstract: Out of all the works written by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, the most famous ones are his early dramas of the Sturm und Drang artistic epoch and late novels inspired by late Enlightenment. The 'transitional' period between them that falls on the 1790s is left practically understudied by the Russian theory and history of literature. To fill in this gap at least partially, the author of the article analyzes two comedies written by Klinger in 1780, 'Prince Silkworm, Reformator and Crown Seeker', and 'Dervish'. These comedies mark Klinger's retreatfrom aesthetics and ideology of the Sturm und Drang. In his research Gladilin used the historical typological research method taking into account attribution of a literary work to a certain artistic paradigm. The author of the article concludes that these plays have an eclectic artistic style that combines the features of sentamentalism, rococo and Englightenment satire, the first play also having the conmmedia dell’arte feature. During that period Klinger's worldview had such typical features as retreat from youthful rigorism and acceptance of imperfection of human nature combined with playful orrational attitude to literature.