Shostakovich's Five Satires (Pictures of the Past) for soprano and piano, Op. 109, was composed in 1960 directly after the Eighth String Quartet. The texts were drawn from satiric poems by the fin-de-siècle Russian poet Sasha Chyorny. A book of Chyorny's verse had recently been republished, and Shostakovich received a copy of it from his son-in-law, but there is evidence that he already knew at least some of the verses extremely well, and that he had recited parts of it from memory in Kuibishev, during the World War II.

After his grimly autobiographical Eighth Quartet and his impending forced membership in the Communist Party, Shostakovich's Satires are a sort of release of the pressure valve of his emotions in the form humor. Shostakovich had, however, an extremely bitter and caustic sense of humor, and he was rightly concerned that the Soviet authorities might condemn the work. Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, to whom the cycle was dedicated, read through the music, accompanied on the piano by her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, in the summer of 1960. It was Vishnevskaya who came up with the idea of subtitling the songs "Pictures of the Past," thereby giving the work, in Shostakovich's phrase, "a fig leaf."

Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich premiered the Satires on 22 February 1961, on a program which included Shostakovich's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. The Satires were so enthusiastically received that the entire cycle was encored. However, Vishnevskaya was not permitted to record the songs nor was the performance allowed to be broadcast either by radio or television.

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