“Once Suler, Sergei Lvovich, Tchekhov, and some one else, were sitting in the park and talking about women: he listened in silence for a long time and then suddenly said: ‘And I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the grave. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, “Do what you like now.”’ The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.”
Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf)