In the fall of 1942 Shostakovich and his family were living in the city of Kuybyshev, where they had been evacuated by the Soviet government in order to escape the Nazi siege of Leningrad. That October the composer learned about the death of his former piano professor Leonid Nikolayev, who had died in Tashkent earlier that month from typhoid fever. "I loved him greatly and it grieves me to think that I shall never see him again", Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman. "I have thought much about his life and shall miss him sorely."