According to the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica. I am supposed to have a body of fair proportions, but legs that are rather short, and somewhat bandy. Dark, swarthy, yellow, copper-coloured are all adjectives that can employed to describe my complexion, the truth being that my habits of life do not conduce either to the preservation or display of the natural colour of my skin, and that I could be really fair, but I am proably really dark. The colour of my hair can range from blonde and reddish to a bluish or greyish black; my eyes are either black, hazel, blue or grey.

The shape of my skull is my most striking peculiarity. I am of the most brachycephalous type of man in Europe, perhaps in the world. As a child my eyes were large, open and round. My nose is low and broad. Wrinkled and puckered by exposure to the weather, my face even as young assumed an appearance of old age. My muscular'system is well developed, but there is deficiency of fatty tissue, which affects the features (particularly by giving relative prominence to the eyes) and the general character of the skin. The thinness of the skin, indeed, can but rarely be paralleled among other Europeans. My index is shorter than the ring finger. I am quiet, and inoffensive. I almost never commit crimes of violence, but sometimes I kill a tame reindeer belonging to others. In Russia, however, I have a bad reputation for lying, general untrustworthiness, and drunkenness.