trips and the black market, see Aleksandr Y. Davydov, Meshochniki i diktatura v Rossii 1917–1921.18 18 Natalya Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, pp. 57ff.
19 19 Ibid., p. 124. The perfume is said to recall the scent of a bouquet, with notes that gradually emerge on the skin; see https://fanfact.ru/duhi-krasnaja-moskva-pridumal-francuzskij-parfjumer.
20 20 This is according to Marina Koleva, ‘Sovetskaya parfyumeriya’, pp. 74–85 (here p. 80); Viktoriya Wlasowa, ‘Krasnaya Moskva’; Nina Nazarova, ‘“Krasnaya Moskva”’.
21 21 Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, p. 125; ‘Medvedevu podarili dukhi pochti stoletney vyderzhki’, RIA Novosti, 10 October 2011, https://ria.ru/20111010/454649754.html.
22 22 An article by an R. Kronhaus in the magazine Technika Molodezhi (p. 27) says that he first arrived in 1908; Koleva, ‘Sovetskaya parfyumeriya’, p. 80; Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, p. 125.
23 23 Hopefully the documents in the Novaya Zarya company archives will clarify the identity of the two perfumes once and for all.
24 24 Other authors seem to have no doubt that Krasnaya Moskva was derived directly from The Empress’s Favourite Bouquet; see Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, p. 126. The continuity between the two perfumes has been confirmed by Isabelle Chazot of the Osmothèque in Versailles (10 July 2020). Despite being in competition, the relationship between Rallet and Brocard was extremely close. For example, Rallet produced perfume bottles for Brocard (according to Nicolas Maunoury of La Glass Vallée, Pôle Mondial du flaconnage de luxe de la Vallée de La Bresle, 28 September 2020).
25 25 Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, p. 130.
26 26 Dolgopolova, Parfyumeriya v SSSR, I, pp. 66, 67ff.
27 27 Regarding TeZhe, see Veniamin Kozharinov, Russian Perfumery, pp. 122, 123; also see Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne.
Scentscapes: Proust’s madeleine and historiography
A drop of perfume can hold the entire history of the twentieth century. When Gabrielle Coco Chanel met the perfumer Ernest Beaux between the autumn of 1920 and the spring of 1921 in Grasse, the world capital of fragrance on the Riviera, to choose one of his compositions, she had no way of knowing that the formula for the scent that would become internationally famous as Chanel No. 5 was already familiar elsewhere – in Moscow.1
Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow belong to different worlds, but they both represent a departure from the belle époque and a revolution in the world of fragrance – even though they both owed their creation to the anniversary of a dynasty destined to fall. We know much about the success of Chanel No. 5, but very little about the importance of Red Moscow. The Chanel No. 5 bottle has a place of honour in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, while the Red Moscow bottle only became an object of desire for vintage collectors at flea markets and antique shops in the late Soviet period, and particularly after the end of the Soviet Union.2 And Marilyn Monroe’s quip that she wore ‘a few drops of Chanel No. 5’ to bed and nothing else has become not just an advertising slogan but a piece of cultural heritage.
André Malraux believed that France’s international image in the twentieth century was shaped by three figures: Picasso, Chanel and de Gaulle. George Bernard Shaw viewed Coco Chanel and Marie Curie as the most important women of the twentieth century.3 Polina Zhemchuzhina-Molotova, by contrast, is practically unknown. We associate her with her husband Vyacheslav Molotov, who, in turn, is associated with the German–Soviet non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939, or at the very least with the Molotov cocktail (though he could not claim copyright on the term).4 The stories of these two women follow different trajectories, but they are connected and help us to understand something of the internal workings of an epoch that was more deeply divided than almost any other: the ‘Age of Extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) and the lengthy partition of the world that followed it. To tell these two stories is to tell parallel tales whose protagonists knew almost nothing of one another, or barely took note of one another. Their stories are worth pursuing, even if it seems inappropriate to devote all too much attention to fragrances, scents and luxury in the shifting and groaning framework of a world order grown old in the twenty-first century.5 But it is really only now, after the end of the epoch that saw the world divided in two, that we can recount the history of these scents, and, though doing so may not give us a key to what happened in the twentieth century, it can at least give us a better understanding of it. Perhaps it is true that the wide world reflected in a drop of water can also be found in a drop of perfume, which reveals something of the aroma of the century for which it was composed.
We need no ‘olfactory turn’ to explain (much less justify) any scholarly interest that even historians might take in the world of scents and fragrances. Pioneering works such as Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant interpret the world as a world of odours, and consider the history of odours to be integral to understanding historical lifeworlds, thus giving the sense of smell its due in historical scholarship. And Patrick Süskind’s Perfume is not just a brilliantly constructed crime novel, it also revived awareness of the importance of the sense of smell and ensured that the history of odorous substances, perfume production and the effects of fragrances received the attention they deserve. It should be clear by now that, to perceive the historical world, it is not only the eye and ear that are ‘relevant’, with their off-hand acceptance of the privilege granted to audio-visual stimuli. Other senses come into play here, too: smell, touch, taste.6 Although the books by Patrick Süskind and Alain Corbin were published in the 1980s, the sense of smell is only gradually coming into its own in historiography. In the hierarchy of senses, it is at the very bottom. It stands for all that is non-conscious, unconscious, non-rational, irrational, uncontrollable, archaic, dangerous. The Enlightenment banished the sense of smell. ‘Today’s history comes deodorized’ (Roy Porter),7 and sight is considered ‘the most rational of the senses’. ‘While smell may have become “inessential” in the world of science, in the fields of humanities and social sciences it has only begun to show its potential to open vast new territories of exploration. At the very least, it has demonstrated its ability to inspire.’ To put it plainly, we need to ‘sniff around’ history more.8
In wide swathes of Western intellectual thought, we find a suppression of the sense of smell, but also a persistent rebellion against the hegemony of the ‘rational’ senses. Hegel feels powerless against the spread of ‘pure insight’, which he compares to the spread of an odour: ‘It is on this account that the communication of pure insight is comparable to a silent expansion or to the diffusion, say, of a perfume in the unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating infection which does not make itself noticeable beforehand as something opposed to the indifferent element into which it insinuates itself, and therefore cannot be warded off.’9
Kant ranks smell as the most ‘dispensable’ sense in his anthropology and identifies ‘stench’ as the background with which a smell contrasts, the only way it makes ‘sense’:
Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy; for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient. – But as a negative condition of well-being, this sense is not unimportant, in order not to breathe in bad air (oven fumes, the stench of swamps and animal carcasses), or also not to need rotten things for nourishment.10
Nietzsche,
