The poet and prose writer Boris Bugayev, better known as Andrei Bely, arrived in Berlin in November 1921. He lived in a boarding house on Passauer Strasse until October 1923, after which, tired of life in "dying Europe," he returned to Moscow. Literary scholars refer to these two years as Bely's "Berlin Boldino," as he created numerous poems, prose works, essays, and articles in Germany. During this time, Bely was deeply affected by his separation from his first wife, Aseya Turgeneva. Another Russian émigré in Germany, Vladislav Khodasevich, wrote about this: "...the entire Russian Berlin became a curious and spiteful witness to his hysteria."

In 1925, already back in Russia, the writer published an essay about life in Germany titled "One of the Abodes of the Kingdom of Shadows."

You can meet all sorts of people here! Both a juror from Moscow and a literary critic from recent Petrograd, General Krasnov, and the former "peasant" minister V.M. Chernov, waving his gray mane cheerfully...

Arrivals from Russia stock up on shoes, gloves, hats, and umbrellas; they appear in wild, sheep-like hats and tattered fur coats from Soviet Russia, only to leave here as Europeans...

"Here is the Russian spirit: here it smells of Russia!"

And you are surprised, occasionally hearing German speech: What? Germans? What are they doing in "our" city?