Our train was incredibly slow. All five days of the journey Pavel Petrovich was our companion and interlocutor… he spoke to us in a quiet, calm voice, even a little monotonously. But we listened to him with bated breath. It was surprising at that time that he did not smoke in the car, but simply held the pipe in his left hand. There were many smokers among the passengers. However, everyone gradually stopped smoking in their compartments and would go out into the gangway. Although he never even hinted to anyone that smoking was not allowed in the car.

Instead of a mighty, broad-shouldered bearded man, in the semi-darkness of the hallway we are met by a stooped old man with a sparse beard, in a worn cozy home jacket, with a pipe habitually clenched in his nicotine-stained fingers… Pavel Petrovich grins, sucking his pipe, which he smokes slowly, with a kind of cozy wheezing, spreading the smell of ordinary, mild tobacco, with which, as it seems, he himself has been saturated, as well as the manuscripts on the table, and this entire room where he lives and works, and even the flowers in the windows.