Ignat Lebyadkin

Who He Is

Captain Ignat Lebyadkin is the brother of Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina, the lame and visionary woman whom Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin married in secret, and he is the man who lives off what he supposes he knows about that marriage. A fat, curly, red giant, almost always drunk, he presents himself as a most polite gentleman and writes verses for everything: for the love grenade that burst in his chest, for the rich girl who rides by on horseback, for the leg she might break. Years earlier, in Petersburg, he was the buffoon whom Stavrogin called his Falstaff (ch. V, Part One). The book names him first in passing, as the captain for whom Virginsky's wife left her husband (ch. I, Part One), and soon after through the mouth of Liputin, who describes him whipping his sister morning and night and demanding from Stavrogin, every year, compensation for his honor (ch. III, Part One). The trait that defines him is a revelation that never finishes: he says he can tell who his sister is, and each time he is asked to speak, he swallows it.

Trajectory

In ch. III, Part One he grabs the chronicler by the chest in the dark of a courtyard, recites rhymes to love and to the hymn of the Star-Amazon, which is Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, and sends word that he crushes Darya, whom he calls a serf, with two fingers. In ch. IV, Part One, when the chronicler reads aloud, at Liza's request, the letter and verses he sent her, and she wants to know who the author is, Ivan Shatov sums him up in two words:

The letter shows the whole method. The captain calls himself an infusorian before the sun, claims that the idea of marriage would be ridiculous, promises the two hundred souls he will soon have, and offers to reveal a great deal, with documents, even from Siberia. At night Shatov drives him from the door with the reminder that he sells his sister. The captain, challenged to say who she is, stammers that she is, that she is, falls silent for half a minute, and runs down the stairs shouting an insult.

In the drawing room of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, in ch. V, Part One, he arrives in tails and white linen, on Liputin's advice, sober as someone waking from days of drinking. He offers twenty rubles to the servants and hands the bills to a charity committee. He says his sister accepts only what comes from Varvara Petrovna, and when asked why, he answers with the reason of the universe and with a fable, the one about the cockroach that falls into a glass of flies:

When Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky comes in and tells the room a story from Petersburg in which Stavrogin is generous and the captain ungrateful, the captain confirms it point by point, standing before Pyotr with his head down. He says that only now is he waking from four years asleep under a cloud. At the door he bumps into Stavrogin and shrinks back without taking his eyes off him.

In the new house, in ch. II, Part Two, sober for eight days, he declares that he lives like Zosima. He shows the will in which he bequeaths his skeleton to the students, and the poem about the broken leg. Stavrogin cuts the comedy short, lists the drinking bouts, the lies, and the money diverted from his sister, and announces that in two days he will make the marriage public. The captain confesses in tears that he only spoke to Liputin, while drunk, and receives from Stavrogin the version he must repeat if he is asked. Alone on the porch he reasons the way drunks do: either the other man is afraid, and then he is strong, or they are pushing him to denounce. From then on, what he knows becomes something offered to whoever is within reach. An anonymous letter to Lembke offers a denunciation in exchange for pardon and a pension. It circulates in ch. VI, Part Two, is attributed to him by Pyotr in ch. VIII, Part Two, and has its handwriting recognized by Liputin and Tolkachenko in ch. IV, Part Three.

In ch. X, Part Two, Liza stands up in the governor's wife's drawing room and asks Stavrogin, before everyone, to forbid some captain from writing her indecent letters, if he is truly her relation:

At the matinee in ch. I, Part Three, the captain climbs the empty stage in tails and white tie, drunk, lets out a long, happy laugh, and is led off by Liputin and two servants. A moment later Liputin returns to read, as the work of an anonymous poet, verses that several people in the room recognize as his. That night Shatov finds the captain fallen drunk on a sofa. In the morning, in ch. II, Part Three, the captain lies with his throat cut, dressed, on a bench in the house Stavrogin rented for him and paid for six months in advance. His sister and the maid were killed too, and the old green wallet he showed off the day before lies empty on the floor. Pyotr later gives his version: it was a robbery by the convict Fedka, after the money the imbecile showed everyone (ch. III, Part Three). The blame, if any, is Liputin's, who should have sent him to Petersburg with the two hundred and thirty rubles Pyotr had given for that purpose (ch. IV, Part Three). In ch. III, Part Three, Liza asks Stavrogin to say, before God, whether he is guilty of the three deaths. His answer is the closest the book comes to a verdict on the captain's death:

Themes Embodied

Lebyadkin is Truth and Lies in the register of someone who profits from them. Marya Timofeyevna says what she sees, with no interest, and is called mad. He says he knows, and turns what he claims to know into a credit he never settles, because the credit is worth something only while it remains unpaid. He is also the Family reduced to bookkeeping: his sister is both a pension and a point of honor. Even the surname, which he derives from the word for swan so that he can dream of a title of Prince of Monbar, becomes grounds for a complaint against the universe in ch. V, Part One.

The fable of the cockroach supports two readings, and both fit the man. In the first, it is the pose of a noble victim, meant to impress the hostess: the insect who does not complain of being cast out by nature is him. In the second, it is a warning from a man who has something to lose, a man who threatens to reveal and explains that he knows how to keep quiet, and that silence has a price. The text does not choose, and what it shows of him in the following scenes supports both. Before Shatov, who provokes him to speak, his courage vanishes. Before Pyotr, his obedience is immediate.

The book does not show Lebyadkin realizing that the secret is worth more kept silent than told, and worth even more when the one who keeps it is dead. Every buyer, Stavrogin, Pyotr, the governor, has different reasons not to want the captain to talk, and the text shows his silence being managed by everyone: with money, with a ready version, with a train ticket. The novel does not claim that the murderer acted because of what the captain knew. It affirms that the house where he died belonged to Stavrogin, that the money was in plain sight, and that Stavrogin knew they would be killed and did not stop the killers. The cunning the captain attributes to himself, the Cunning of Lebyadkin with a capital C, works only as long as the interests of those who pay him coincide.

Relationships

• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the sister he whips and leaves without food, whom he took out of the convent where, in Pyotr's version, Stavrogin had placed her (ch. V, Part One); she dies beside him the night of the fire (ch. II, Part Three).
• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the secret brother-in-law, from whom the captain receives money for his sister and whom he fears (ch. V, Part One); the one who takes away his chance to speak (ch. II, Part Two) and rents him the house where he dies (ch. II, Part Three).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the one who calls him to order in front of Varvara Petrovna (ch. V, Part One), takes the Lebyadkins across the river (ch. I, Part Two), and puts him among those who get in the way (ch. VIII, Part Two).
• Liputin: the drunken confidant to whom the captain told the secret (ch. II, Part Two), who advises him on what to wear to the salon (ch. V, Part One), and whose verses he reads at the matinee (ch. I, Part Three).
• Ivan Shatov: the upstairs tenant who drags him back home by the hair (ch. IV, Part One), and who, on the last night, finds him fallen on a sofa (ch. II, Part Three).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the addressee of the verses and letters (ch. IV, Part One), whom he is named alongside in public before Stavrogin (ch. X, Part Two).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: the one he accuses of keeping part of the three hundred rubles Stavrogin sent from Switzerland (ch. III, Part One), and to whom she answers calmly that she handed everything over (ch. V, Part One).