He was tall and used to joke that, when he is dead, his coffin would be stuck in a doorway of the Marble Palace.

At age sixteen, he complained suddenly of a splitting headache and violent illness.

He lay with a Russian Orthodox icon on his pillow as his family surrounded him, urging him to breathe.

His mother later reported that she had seen the ghost of a white lady in the art gallery at Pavlovsk on the day before Vyacheslav became ill. She took the apparition as a portent of death.

His brother Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia later recalled, as he walked in Vyacheslav's funeral procession, how much Vyacheslav enjoyed drawing funeral processions in great detail.