Elena Yakovitch has published À deux : Ma vie avec Dimitri Chostakovitch, a personal account of the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, compiled from interviews with his third wife, Irina Ivanovna. The book presents a dual narrative: one historical, recounting the experience of a girl during the Siege of Leningrad, and the other more personal, covering the years from their marriage in 1962 until Shostakovich’s death in 1975. Irina Antonovna Chostakovich, who was 27 when they married, worked as an editor and archivist, and spent the last thirteen years of the composer’s life managing his work. However, she never shared her own story until filmmaker Elena Yakovitch spent ten years persuading her to speak out. This is not just a narrative, but an intimate, sincere testimony filled with admiration and love for Shostakovich. The book is based on a long filmed interview conducted in a single day, which served as the foundation for the documentary Deux. L’histoire de la femme de Chostakovitch. Yakovitch created this work to restore a rare voice that had remained unheard for decades. Irina Antonovna recounts how she met Shostakovich, how he lived his daily life, how he composed music and feared losing his creative inspiration, and how they fought for years against his illness until his death. Unlike sensationalized accounts, the book is simple, unemotional, and true to her personality, painting a portrait of a composer who was first and foremost human. Shostakovich’s life during the Stalinist era is portrayed with integrity, including his fears, doubts, friendships with notable figures such as Benjamin Britten, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and his final battles with illness—coronary insufficiency, Charcot’s disease, and lung cancer—which ultimately took his life on August 9, 1975. This testimony, published fifty years after his death, adds another piece to the legacy that his widow built for him. His music has remained an essential part of concert halls for over thirty years. Between the lines, the book humbly but firmly serves as a testament to ensure that Irina Chostakovich herself is not forgotten. It offers a rare glimpse into the personal life of a composer whose work continues to resonate with audiences around the world, while also honoring the woman who spent her life beside him.