...What can I say, I've got a pretty pleasant deputy. He claims, in private conversations, as well as publicly, that Function Theory is a strange subject, a secondary variety of the large mainstream mathematics (=Fiedler geometry and Schwarz minimal surfaces), and that it still has some historical justification here, and that's why one has to tolerate a person like Mellin (he was just appointed a docent by the way), but one cannot permit more of this kind of function theorists here in Finland. About you he repeates the old joke of Schwarz that...

...Unfortunately for Neovius, my position here is still firm enough, that it is he, rather than function theory, suffers from this nonsense.

COMMENTS:
1. This is my translation from a Russian translation from the Swedish original.
2. Neovius, who was a student of H. A. Schwarz is considered the first Finnish mathematician. Brothers Nevanlinna were apparently his nefews; their father changed his name from Neovius (Sweedish) to Nevanlinna (Finnish) when they were young.