Anna Akhmatova and Shostakovich admired each other from afar, but did not meet. Akhmatova rarely missed a Shostakovich premiere. After the first performance of the Eleventh Symphony in 1957 she compared its hopeful revolutionary songs, which the critics had dimissed as devoid of interest (this was the time of the Krushchev thaw) to "white birds flying against a terrible black sky." The next year she dedicated the Soviet edition of her "Poems": "To Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I lived on earth." The two eventually met in 1961. "We sat in silence for twenty minutes. It was wonderful," recalled Akhmatova later in her diaries.

(note from Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes)