The global trend of digitalization and publishing of historical sources, in particular fiction and its existence in different eras, makes the reader constantly reconsider the lives and work of persons who are regarded as prototypes of characters in literary works. As a result, an artistic image, linked to real life and rooted in the past, generates a consistent literary story in the form of artistic biography. The number and variety of such literary works, including dramatic ones, is constantly growing, which determines the topicality of this study. Over the recent decades, biographical fiction drastically changed its forms, and was enriched with numerous genre varieties and modifications. And this process remains far from complete. The term ‘meta-genre of artistic biography’ is introduced to designate it. This term emphasizes the scale of a certain phenomenon and allows defining the subject of the study — the artistic biographical description of the intellectual in contemporary Ukrainian drama — as well as clarify the understanding of the concept of the ‘intellectual,’ and problematize ways of describing characters of this type. The purpose of the article is to identify the genre-style unity of Ukraine’s modern drama about intellectuals and prove the expediency of the application to it of interpretive approaches to popular knowledge from related areas (history, philosophy, art). Specifically, such varieties of genres as personal artistic biography and intellectual artistic biography were singled out and proposed for the first time on the literary material (S. Rosovetskyi), and that is the research novelty. The research methodology is defined by an interdisciplinary approach that appeals to the achievements of literary criticism, art criticism, history, and philosophy. Results of the Study are connected with considerations that the interest in the artistic biography of the intellectual is associated with a general trend to anthropologize scientific knowledge, coupled with the growing interest of the audience in the individual and personal in the history and in the present, with the dominance of the emotional component in contemporary media discourses, resulting in the actualization of an emotional narrative of the intellectual’s biography, which often sounds tragic nowadays in the context of the catastrophic past of the Ukrainian science and culture.