Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov) on Russian women:
"
And yet one would have thought the creature standing
before him most simple and ordinary, a good-natured, kind woman,
handsome certainly, but so like other handsome ordinary women! It is
true she was very, very good-looking with that Russian beauty so
passionately loved by many men. She was a rather tall woman, though
a little shorter than Katerina Ivanovna, who was exceptionally tall.
She had a full figure, with soft, as it were, noiseless, movements,
softened to a peculiar over-sweetness, like her voice. She moved,
not like Katerina Ivanovna, with a vigorous, bold step, but
noiselessly. Her feet made absolutely no sound on the floor. She
sank softly into a low chair, softly rustling her sumptuous black silk
dress, and delicately nestling her milk-white neck and broad shoulders
in a costly cashmere shawl. She was twenty-two years old, and her face
looked exactly that age. She was very white in the face, with a pale
pink tint on her cheeks. The modelling of her face might be said to be
too broad, and the lower jaw was set a trifle forward. Her upper lip
was thin, but the slightly prominent lower lip was at least twice as
full, and looked pouting. But her magnificent, abundant dark brown
hair, her sable-coloured eyebrows and charming greyblue eyes with
their long lashes would have made the most indifferent person, meeting
her casually in a crowd in the street, stop at the sight of her face
and remember it long after. What struck Alyosha most in that face
was its expression of childlike good nature. There was a childlike
look in her eyes, a look of childish delight. She came up to the
table, beaming with delight and seeming to expect something with
childish, impatient, and confiding curiosity. The light in her eyes
gladdened the soul- Alyosha felt that. There was something else in her
which he could not understand, or would not have been able to
define, and which yet perhaps unconsciously affected him. It was
that softness, that voluptuousness of her bodily movements, that
catlike noiselessness. Yet it was a vigorous, ample body. Under the
shawl could be seen full broad shoulders, a high, still quite
girlish bosom. Her figure suggested the lines of the Venus of Milo,
though already in somewhat exaggerated proportions. That could be
divined. Connoisseurs of Russian beauty could have foretold with
certainty that this fresh, still youthful beauty would lose its
harmony by the age of thirty, would "spread"; that the face would
become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon her
forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would grow coarse and
red perhaps- in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment, the
fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women."