martyrdom. His eyelids, lips, and every fibre of his face quivered with nervous contractions. His features would grow fierce with anger when excited over some subject of discussion, and at another time would wear the gentle expression of sadness you so often see in the saints on the ancient Slavonic altar-pieces, so venerated by the Slav nation. The man's nature was wholly plebeian, with the curious mixture of roughness, sagacity, and mildness of the Russian peasant, together with something incongruous—possibly an effect of the concentration of thought illumining this beggar's mask. At first he rather repelled you, before his strange magnetism had begun to act upon you. He was generally taciturn, but when he spoke it was in a low tone, slow and deliberate, growing gradually more earnest, and defending his opinions without regard to any one. While sustaining his favorite theme of the superiority of the Russian lower classes, he often observed to ladies in the fashionable society he was drawn into, "You cannot pretend to compare with the most inferior peasant."
There was not much opportunity for literary discussion with Dostoyevski. He would stop you with one word of proud disdain. "We possess the best qualities of every other people, and our own peculiar ones in addition; therefore we can understand you, but you are not capable of understanding us."
