By the time Stravinsky had penned his first musical epitaph Funeral Song (1908), marking the death of his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the twenty-six-year-old composer had already witnessed many deaths; during his childhood and youth he often experienced the pain of losing close relatives, friends and peers. As residents of St Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, Fyodor Stravinsky and his family had attended many a funeral ceremony and bade farewell to several notable Russian musicians, writers and statesmen. The composer was already in his fifties when he published his autobiography Chronicle of My Life (1936), yet he chose to mention these events only briefly. Much later, in his eighties, possibly because he was approaching the final years of his own life, Stravinsky revisited these episodes in conversation with Robert Craft and described them in poignant detail. He would open up, too, about his emotions, revealing that he had never been able to erase such raw experiences from his memory. Even after many decades had passed he could still recall the appearance of the deceased persons lying in state and his own feelings as he filed past their open coffin.