Shostakovich first set four poems by Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, to music in Four Romances, Op. 46, in 1942. Those settings were passionately pessimistic but still contained a kernel of defiance, even in despair. When Shostakovich next turned to Pushkin in 1952, the pessimism was no longer tempered by passion, and his despair was without defiance. The Four Monologues by Pushkin for bass and piano are the songs of a man condemned not to death but to living death, a life working under the shadow of the Party and Stalin, without hope and without faith in the possibility of change.

The first song, "Fragment," is virtually an addendum to the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79 (1948?): a desperately poor Jewish family, shunned by their community, sits alone in the cold hovel when "a heavy hand knocks at the door." The music is dark and lugubrious. The second song, "What is My Name to You?" is a broken waltz in which the composer through the poet tries to find a small measure of consolation in being remembered after his death to music which sorrowfully wistful. The third song, "In the Depths of the Siberian Mines," about the descendants of Polish revolutionaries being sent to the Tsarist mines in Siberia, is as black as its title, with slowly descending melodic lines over a trudging march.

The final song, "Farewell," sounds almost conventionally pretty except for a few dissonances. But in context of Pushkin's text, "So receive, distant beloved, my heart's farewell, like a wife become a widow, like a friend silently embracing his friend before the gate of his prison," Shostakovich's music seems to be purposefully avoiding the meaning of the text, willfully putting out of mind the finality of the songs.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide