The fatal eggs

Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov... He was exactly fifty-eight years old. He had a wonderful, pestle-shaped bald head with tufts of yellowish hair sticking out at the sides. A cleanly shaven face, a protruding lower lip that gave Persikov's face a permanently capricious expression.

Small, old-fashioned glasses in silver frames on his red nose; small, sparkling eyes; tall, round-shouldered. Spoke in a screeching, high-pitched, croaking voice, and one of his many eccentricities was shaping his right index finger into a hook and squinting whenever he was speaking confidently and authoritatively. And since he always spoke authoritatively, for his knowledge of his fields of study was absolutely phenomenal, those conversing with Persikov would see the hook quite often.

Outside his fields - that is, zoology, embryology, anatomy, botany and geography - Professor Persikov rarely said anything at all. Professor Persikov did not read the papers or go to the theatre, and his wife had left him with a tenor from Zimin's Opera House in 1913, leaving him the following note: 'Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable disgust. I will be unhappy my entire life because of them.'