For centuries, the Russian traveler, crossing the border, felt an inexplicable lightness, as if an unseen burden had been lifted from his shoulders. In 1839, the Marquis de Custine recorded the comments of a German innkeeper in Travemunde who remarked that when Russians arrived on their way to Europe, they had a “gay, free, happy air.” When they returned, the same people had “long, gloomy tormented faces.” Their conversation was brief, “their speech abrupt.” The innkeeper concluded that a country that “one leaves with so much joy and returns to with such regret” must be a “bad country.”
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