To be fair, it’s not just him. Whenever I gave a poster at a conference, there was a chance that someone with a Russian sounding name would call the work trivia

To be fair, it’s not just him. Whenever I gave a poster at a conference, there was a chance that someone with a Russian sounding name would call the work trivial and say they had already published it in the nineties ;). Of course, on closer inspection that was not the case. I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.