Captain Lebyadkin and V. K. Trediakovsky

The persona of Captain Lebyadkin, a character of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, is analyzed in the article. The emphasized abnormality of the aesthetics of his writings and his provocative behavior correlate with the literary reputation of V. K. Trediakovsky, who was known as a «funny» poet, a poet of the absurd, with his poetry remaining outside the literary canon, but his theoretical constructions having a considerable influence on the literary process. Trediakovsky, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was a personification of the literary bad taste, and therefore Dostoevsky found him interesting as an aesthetic counterweight to the dictate of «good taste», embodied in the criticism of V. G. Belinsky.