To Landau himself listening to the papers was never an empty formality: he did not rest until the essence of a study was completely elucidated and all traces of "philology" - unproved statements or proposi- propositions made on the principle of "why might it not" - therein were eliminated. As a result of such discussion and criticism many studies were condemned as "pathology" and Landau completely lost interest in them. On the other hand, articles that really contained new ideas or findings were included in the so-called "gold fund" and remained in Landau's memory for ever. In fact, usually it was sufficient for him to know just the guiding idea of a study in order to reproduce all of its findings. As a rule, he found it easier to obtain them on his own than to follow in detail the author's reasoning. In this way he reproduced for himself and profoundly thought out most of the basic results obtained in all the domains of theoretical physics, f This probably also was the reason for his phenomenal ability to answer practically any question concerning physics that might be asked of him. Landau's scientific style was free of the - unfortunately fairly wide- widespread - tendency to complicate simple things (often on the grounds of generality and rigour which, however, usually turn out to be illusory). He himself always strove towards the opposite - to simplify complex things, to uncover in the most lucid manner the genuine simplicity of the laws under- underlying the natural phenomena. This ability of his, this skill at "trivializing" things as he himself used to say, was to him a matter of special pride.

— Курс теоретической физики. Том I. Механика by Lev Landau, Evgeny Lifshitz, Leonid Pyatigorsky