The Four Verses by Captain Lebyadkin for bass and piano, Op. 146, were "bits and pieces" Shostakovich composed in the summer of 1974—the same summer he composed his String Quartet in E flat minor, Op. 144, and his Suite on Texts by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145. Unlike the harrowing death rattle of the quartet and the love and acceptance of the suite, Shostakovich's Lebyadkin Songs sneer at every emotion, disdain every ideal, and express hate for everything and everyone—including the composer himself.

Captain Lebyadkin is a character from Dostoevsky's The Devils (also known as The Possessed). According to a Russian Dostoevsky scholar who was also a correspondent of Shostakovich's, the composer had reread the novel in the early 1970s and "was more firmly convinced than ever that this was a prophetic book, a warning about the dangers that threaten mankind if political murderers, demagogues and executioners seize power" (Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Elisabeth Wilson, p. 461). After the completion of the Four Verses, Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman, "I have turned out a very sinister composition" (Shostakovich, Laurel Fay, p. 283). According to the pianist Evgeny Shenerovich who accompanied bass Evgeny Nesterenko in the Four Verses, Shostakovich once said, "You know, Lebyadkin is of course a buffoon and a laughing stock. But there is something frighteningly creepy about him" (Wilson, p. 458). Shostakovich wasn't exaggerating, but, typically, his description still fell short of the reality of the songs (a lifetime of camouflaging his intentions so as not to be caught out by the Party diedhard). The first song, "The Love of Captain Lebyadkin," quotes an aria by the lecherous Count Monterone from Verdi's Rigoletto and also quotes from Tchaikovsky's tender love song In the Silence of the Mysterious Night, but turns them both to excrement in absurd verses that abominate Romantic love. The second, "The Cockroach," breaks a major key Russian children's song into a shattered minor key in describing the disgusting fate of a contemptible insect. The third, "The Ball for the Benefit of the Governesses," depicts those paragons of feminine virtue as whores and a ball for their benefit as pandering and pimping in music of savage lust and violence. In music of bitter sarcasm, the final song, "A Radiant Personality," spits on every heroic virtue and every man who would be a hero, including and most of the all the composer himself.

The Four Verses may seem ridiculous or repulsive, or even vile and evil—which, of course, they are. To say that the Four Verses are merely the last in a long line of dissident rants against the Soviet state, however, is too reductive. In the last summer of his life, in his final verse setting, Shostakovich denies everything and everyone and embraces nihilism.

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