worlds as well. But other substances and subjects topped my academic agenda. I had no project in mind, no intention of trying to fill a research gap or produce evidence of a new ‘turn’ in cultural studies. My understanding of the world of fragrance was modest at best, probably in keeping with the average experience of a man who knows the bare minimum about soaps, deodorants, creams and colognes. My contact with this world was marginal and occasional, occurring only when I traversed the perfume section of a department store (usually on the ground floor and almost impossible to avoid) or passed the inevitable duty-free shops in the airport on the way to my gate. What captured my attention was not so much the scent, or the peculiar mélange of scents, but rather the light and sparkle of crystal, the rainbow of colours, mirrors and glass, and the perfect make-up of the women who were not staff or salespeople here but models, living embodiments of elegance. This glittering world with its endless gradations of colour and nuance always felt very alien to me.
And yet, I had a strong urge to overcome my scruples and venture into this special universe, even without prior knowledge of it. It is an act of self-empowerment, in a way, to take the liberty of writing on a topic you previously knew almost nothing about. Any concerns were overridden by an initial impulse that proved to be more than just a fleeting impression. This impulse was to follow a trail in the kind of pursuit that develops its own drive, its own pull, which is not exhausted and extinguished until the trail has been uncovered and the story has been told.*
In the beginning was a scent. It filled the air on every festive occasion in the Soviet Union – at the Moscow Conservatory, in the Bolshoi Theatre, at graduation ceremonies and weddings. The somewhat sweet, heavy aroma came to be associated in my mind with fairly staid crowds, polished parquet floors, luminous chandeliers, audience members circulating the theatre foyer during intermissions. I encountered this scent later on as well, in East Germany, usually at official receptions, in the context of German–Soviet meetings and at officers’ clubs. My original thought was to track down the scent, maybe find out the brand name. Everything else just fell into place after that.
My initial research revealed that the scent was a perfume by the name of Red Moscow. We know the story of the wildly successful Chanel No. 5, but few know the history of the most popular Soviet perfume. As it turns out, both fragrances can be traced back to a common origin, a composition created by French perfumers in the Russian Empire, one of whom – Ernest Beaux – returned to France after the Russian Revolution and Civil War and met Coco Chanel, while the other – Auguste Michel – stayed in Russia, helped to establish the Soviet perfume industry and used a perfume known as Le Bouquet Favori de l’Impératrice as the basis for Red Moscow. Both perfumes represent the birth of new worlds of fragrance, radically different life stories, the cultural milieus of Paris and Moscow in the first half of the twentieth century, and the seductive scent of power that permeated two careers: that of Coco Chanel, who became involved with the Germans in occupied Paris, and that of the lesser-known Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and a people’s commissar in her own right, who, for a time, was responsible for the entire Soviet cosmetics and perfume industry. Coco Chanel temporarily settled in Switzerland after the war, while Polina Zhemchuzhina-Molotova was caught up in the antisemitic campaigns of the late 1940s and spent five years in exile, where she experienced the ‘smell of the camps’. Chanel achieved success in the Parisian fashion scene of the 1950s, while Zhemchuzhina lived in seclusion with her husband in Moscow and remained a fervent Stalinist until her death in 1970. And a side track in my research led to the ‘grande dame of German film’, Olga Chekhova, who was also a trained cosmetologist.
As popular as the perfume Red Moscow may have been, it had little way of countering the stagnation of the late Soviet Union and pressure of the global fragrance industry. But it returned to the market in post-Soviet Russia, and its very existence – much like the passion of those who collect perfume bottles – has become emblematic of a peculiar ‘search for lost time’. Such a search is bound to turn up startling revelations, not least that the Russian avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich (anonymously) designed the bottle for the Soviet Union’s best-selling eau de toilette before going on to paint Black Square, an iconic work of twentieth-century art.
There were long periods of research in which nothing much happened, but then another surprising discovery would propel things along again. When you rove the bazaars of Russian cities and start collecting bottles and pre-revolutionary advertising posters, you encounter amateurs everywhere who have turned themselves into experts. When you make a pilgrimage to the Place Vendôme and 31 rue Cambon to see the staircase where Coco Chanel presented her collections, you learn that the world of luxury is no less enlightening a subject of social analysis than historical studies of the everyday life of ordinary people. The boutiques and perfumeries on rue Saint-Honoré offer a glimpse of the grandeur of craftsmanship and boundless imagination of artists and designers. This book might never have been written without the inspiration of the great Karl Lagerfeld. When you visit museums and archives that you never would have strayed into otherwise, you uncover networks and personal relationships that only become visible in the light of a specific constellation – Diaghilev as a contemporary of Coco Chanel; Malevich as a contemporary of Tiffany, Gallé and Lalique. And when you poke around on the internet, you find that Red Moscow is not just a nostalgic collector’s item. You can order it online whenever you like.
Every age has its own aroma, its scent, its smell. The ‘Age of Extremes’ brought forth its own scentscapes. Revolutions, wars and civil wars are olfactory events as well. The divided world of the last century can now be united and explored as a whole, post festum – by following our nose, as it were.
Berlin / Los Angeles, spring 2019
Karl Schlögel
Notes
1 * I first picked up the trail leading to Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow when writing my book Das sowjetische Jahrhundert (‘The Soviet Century’).
The scent of the empire, or how Le Bouquet de Catherine from 1913 led to Chanel No. 5 and the Soviet perfume Red Moscow after the Russian Revolution
It all looks like a coincidence. Late in the summer of 1920, Coco Chanel met the perfumer Ernest Beaux in his laboratory in Cannes. The encounter had probably been arranged by Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, a grand duke by virtue of his affiliation with the Russian imperial family, cousin to the last tsar, and Chanel’s lover at the time. Exiled from Russia, he was now living in France.1 Like the grand duke – who was a close friend of Prince Felix Yusupov, the man who had orchestrated the murder of Rasputin in the winter of 1916 – Ernest Beaux belonged to the world of luxury and the fashions of the Russian aristocracy. Previously the senior perfumer at A. Rallet & Co., purveyor to the imperial court in Moscow, Beaux had returned to France after the Russian Revolution and Civil War and joined the French perfume house Chiris in Grasse, which had purchased Rallet. In 1913, he had developed Le Bouquet de Catherine for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, but the fragrance was renamed Rallet No. 1 in 1914, since an homage to a tsarina from Anhalt-Zerbst was not expected to go down well with Russian customers while Russia was at war with Germany. Beaux had taken the formula for this perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. Presented with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory, Coco Chanel chose number five, the scent that would later go by the brand name Chanel No. 5.
1 Le Bouquet Favori de l’Impératrice (1913)
Tilar J. Mazzeo, author of an Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume, describes the scene as follows:
There in front of them were ten small glass vials, labeled from one to five and twenty
