“I know your jubilees. For twenty-five years they do nothing but abuse and ridicule a man, and then you give him a pen made of aluminum and slobber over him for a whole day, and cry, and kiss him, and gush!”
To talk of his fame and his popularity he would answer in the same way—with two or three words or a jest.
“Have you read it, Anton Pavlovitch?” one would ask, having read an article about him.
He would look slyly over his spectacles, ludicrously lengthen his face, and say in his deep voice:
“Oh, a thousand thanks! There is a whole column, and at the bottom of it, ‘There is also a writer called Chekhov: a discontented man, a grumbler.’”
Sometimes he would add seriously:
“When you find yourself criticized, remember us sinners. The critics boxed our ears for trifles just as if we were school-boys. One of them foretold that I should die in a ditch. He supposed that I had been expelled from school for drunkenness.”
I never saw Chekhov lose his temper. Very seldom was he irritated, and if it did happen he controlled himself astonishingly. I remember, for instance, that he was once annoyed by reading in a book that he was “indifferent” to questions of morality and society, and that he was a pessimist. Yet his annoyance showed itself only in two words:
“Utter idiot!”
Nor did I find him cold. He said that he was cold when he wrote, and that he only wrote when the thoughts and images that he was about to express were perfectly clear to him, and then he wrote on, steadily, without interruptions, until he had brought it to an end.