Contemporaries called Filonov "an eyewitness to the invisible." The artist believed that even an apple tree could not be painted if one did not imagine the whole process of its organic growth. Filonov wrote that he was not interested in depicting a person's pants and hat, but it was interesting to try to express what was happening in a person's head. Throughout almost his entire creative life, he repeatedly turned to this topic, for which it is not so easy to find a visual image. Shostakovich's First Symphony is one of her interpretations. Filonov explained his method as follows. Artists of a realistic orientation paint directly what they see from a certain point of view. The method of analytical art involves the depiction of any object from different points of view. That is, images of one object from different points of view, as if superimposed on each other, forming a complex pattern. Invisible processes both in the life of nature and in the thoughts of man, Filonov conveys non-objective forms in the depths of which figurative images arise. So it is in the composition “Shostakovich's First Symphony”, where human faces emerge from the depths of non-objective forms to the surface of the canvas.