During his 1959 tour of the Soviet Union, Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) honored two Russian cultural icons who had been ostracized in official circles—poet and novelist Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) and composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975). After Bernstein ended his farewell concert with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the audience’s ovation lasted twenty minutes. Backstage, Pasternak, whose presence at the concert marked his first public appearance following his censure, remarked, “I’ve never felt so close to the aesthetic truth.”