"You managed that nicely," I observed when they had gone.

Anton Pavlovitch laughed quietly and said: "Every one should speak his own language�"

He (Anton Chekhov) had the art of revealing everywhere and driving away banality, an art which is only possible to a man who demands much from life and which comes from a keen desire to see men simple, beautiful, harmonious. Banality always found in him a discerning and merciless judge�

Once a plump, healthy, handsome, well-dressed lady came to him and began to speak � la Chekhov: "Life is so boring, Anton Pavlovitch. Everything is so gray: people, the sea, even the flowers seem to me gray. ... And I have no desires ... my soul is in pain ... it is like a disease."

"It is a disease," said Anton Pavlovitch with conviction, "it is a disease; in Latin it is called morbus imitatis." Fortunately the lady did not seem to know Latin, or, perhaps, she pretended not to know it�

"A Russian is a strange creature," he once remarked. "He is like a sieve; nothing remains in him. In his youth he fills himself greedily with anything which he comes across, and after thirty years nothing remains but a kind of gray rubbish. ... In order to live well and humanly one must work--work with love and with faith. But we, we can't do it. An architect, having built a couple of decent buildings, sits down to play cards, plays all his life, or else is to be found somewhere behind the scenes of some theatre. A doctor, if he has a practice, ceases to be interested in science, and reads nothing but The Medical Journal, and at forty seriously believes that all diseases have their origin in catarrh. I have never met a single civil servant who had any idea of the meaning of his work: usually he sits in the metropolis or the chief town of the province, and writes papers and sends them off to Zmiev or Smargon for attention. But that those papers will deprive some one in Zmiev or Smargon of freedom of movement--of that a civil servant thinks as little as an atheist of the tortures of hell. A lawyer who has made a name by a successful defense ceases to care about justice, and defends only the rights of property, gambles on the Turf, eats oysters figures as a connoisseur of all the arts. An actor, having taken taken two or three parts tolerably, no longer troubles to learn his parts, puts on a silk hat, and thinks himself a genius. Russia is a land of insatiable and lazy people: they eat enormously of nice things, drink, like to sleep in the day-time, and snore in their sleep. They marry in order to get their house looked after and keep mistresses in order to be thought well of in society. Their psychology is that of a dog: when they are beaten, they whine shrilly and run into their kennels; when petted, they lie on their backs with their paws in the air and wag their tails�