If anyone had slapped him in the face, I should have expected him not to challenge his assailant to a duel, but to murder him on the spot.

He was just one of those characters, and would have killed the man, knowing very well what he was doing, and without losing his self-control.

I fancy, indeed, that he never was liable to those fits of blind rage which deprive a man of all power of reflection.
Even when overcome with intense anger, as he sometimes was, he was always able to retain complete self-control, and therefore to realise that he would certainly be sent to penal servitude for murdering a man not in a duel; nevertheless, he'd have killed any one who insulted him, and without the faintest hesitation.
I have been studying Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch of late, and through special circumstances I know a great many facts about him now, at the time I write.

I should compare him, perhaps, with some gentlemen of the past of whom legendary traditions are still perceived among us.

We are told, for instance, about the Decabrist L--n, that he was always seeking for danger, that he revelled in the sensation, and that it had become a craving of his nature; that in his youth he had rushed into duels for nothing; that in Siberia he used to go to kill bears with nothing but a knife; that in the Siberian forests he liked to meet with runaway convicts, who are, I may observe in passing, more formidable than bears.
There is no doubt that these legendary gentlemen were capable of a feeling of fear, and even to an extreme degree, perhaps, or they would have been a great deal quieter, and a sense of danger would never have become a physical craving with them.