Mr Scogan, a character from Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, doubted that people could ever get away from themselves entirely, as if they were to embark forever on a ‘complete holiday’, claiming that they ‘never succeed in getting farther than Southend’. Gombaud, his interlocutor, disagreed:

For the Russians, ‘the war’ – World War I – was only the beginning. After two revolutions, they withdrew from that war, only to be faced with invasion from fourteen hostile nations together with a civil war much protracted by funding from the same nations. An enforced holiday from normal life turned into a protracted voyage that took them ever further from their pre-Revolutionary selves. To use an expression from the poet Osip Mandelshtam, people were ‘knocked out of their biographies like billiard balls out of pockets’. For some, a metaphoric holiday trip turned into real exile: abroad, as émigrés, they often sought to reconstitute the past, with little success.