Naoumoff, who spent ten impressionable years studying with Mademoiselle Boulanger (as he still calls her), recounts his formation under Nadia’s tutelage and the impact she had on his life as a musician, a teacher, and a human being. Although she could be, according to Naoumoff, almost “Stalinian” in her obsessive attention to detail, she also possessed a combination of “enthusiasm and rigor” that Naoumoff never found in another teacher after Boulanger’s death. “She never shaped my mind to match her thoughts,” he remembers; “instead, she stimulated me to become myself.”