Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin

Fyodor Dostoevsky (R)

Captain Lebyadkin is a fictional character from Dostoyevsky’s 1871 novel ‘The Possessed’ or ‘The Devils’. Shostakovich particularly admired this novel, with its nightmarish portrayal of a society in the grip of evil and upheaval. The captain is a loathsome figure with absurd pretensions to being a poet. Dostoyevsky makes bitter fun of him by composing deliberately bad poems (which are at the same time, in their own way, very striking) as examples of the captain’s work. The captain himself, of course, takes the poems entirely seriously.


Shostakovich’s brutal and deliberately primitive settings of these verses is almost like a tiny opera. We hear and imagine the boorish captain  singing the songs himself, and we laugh and at the same time are appalled by his grossness and malevolence. In this short work written at the end of his life, for a tiny moment Shostakovich returns to the satire and harshness of his early operas ‘The Nose’ op.15 and ’Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’ op.29.


Note by Gerard McBurney