... I was stunned, and first and foremost by his choice of such apparently disparate poems. It had never occurred to me that they could be united like that. In my book ["The Wave of a Hand"] I didn't put them next to each other. But here the jolly, youthful, anti-bureaucratic "career" and the poem "Humor," full of jaunty lines, were linked with the melancholy and graphic poem about tired Russian women queueing in a shop. Then came "Fears Are Dying in Russia." Shostakovich interpreted it in his own way, giving it a depth and insight that the poem lacked before... In connecting all these poems like that, Shostakovich completely changed me as a poet.