But as many a provocative overstatement, this one has some truth to it, particularly if eight is replaced with eighty. From writing a few papers longer even than that, I recall the certain numbness of mind which might set in on page seventy-seven, when I no longer could remember notations or definitions from the first ten pages, and I didn't care enough to look them up. If one believes in miracles, such a paper may still be right. The paper by Lyubich has 113 pages and while lengthy by any standard it is hardly an exception in the field of conformal dynamics. In fact, some recent works in this area have never been published as articles, but appeared straightaway as books.
Great complexity seems to be the staple of works in one-dimensional dynamics.
One could speculate about reasons for this state of affairs. First of all, proofs in dynamical systems tend to be complicated. When such an explanation is undertaken it often leads to lengthy combinatorial, topological or geometric constructions. Somewhat paradoxically, the technical side of one-dimensional proofs also tends to be very complicated. Without getting into the exact meaning of these principles, they are not theorems or even well-defined techniques, but merely indications of directions in which to search.