“Day after day, we traverse zones marked out by smells – the steam rising from coffee in a takeaway paper cup, the grease of a chip shop, the technoid whiff of oil and tar as we glide down an escalator into a subway station,” writes the historian Karl Schlogel.
The heart and nose of this book is reminding readers, even those of us completely uninterested in perfume, of how distinctive smell is in its ability to awaken memories. Smell, Schlogel quotes the philosopher Schopenhauer, is the time-traveler sense: “because it recalls to our mind more directly than anything else the specific impression of an event or an environment, even from the most remote past.”
Schlogel is the author of several works on Russia in the twentieth century and did not set out in a single-minded or commercially minded way to tell the crisscrossing story of two famous perfumes. By a series of surreptitious coincidences in his research, The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow became a history about the marketing of Russian and Soviet perfume, focusing particularly on the makers and promoters of Red Moscow. Those promoters included Polina Zhemchuzhina-Molotova (wife of Stalin’s infamous crony Vyacheslav Molotov), who “for a time was responsible for the entire Soviet cosmetics and perfume industry.” In parallel with the story of Red Moscow is the success of Coco Chanel’s Chanel No. 5, which she and France (and the world) had no idea originated as an immediate descendant of Red Moscow.
Where readers’ sympathy might run into a wall is Schlogel’s paired presentation of Molotova and Chanel.
Though Molotova was persecuted for being Jewish and consequently imprisoned for five years by Stalin, she never lost her devotion to the Beast: “To the end of her days … she remained a fervent, and even fanatical Stalinist.”
Chanel, on the other hand, was a Nazi collaborator who paid a small price for her actions during World War II. It’s too bad the two leading figures of this story sold their souls to monsters, and one shouldn’t deduce that perfume had anything to do with their reprehensibility… It’s just a coincidence, probably.
Schlogel discusses ever interestingly various studies of smell as well as passages from Russian literary classics, including the tortured heightened sense of taste and smell for the prisoners in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and the giddy, ecstatic women in Bulgakov’s theater scene in Master and Margarita, where “As a souvenir of the evening they are given a bottle of perfume to take home.”
This short, original book is a complete surprise and nothing to sniff at.
Reading The Life Written by Himself is like meeting a Dostoyevsky or Chekhov character come to life – but Avvakum was alive and kicking long before Russian literature could invent him.
In this “polemical, didactic autobiography” (as the translator describes it) by the “bellicose” archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620/21-1682), he is impossible yet sympathetic. This is no twenty-first century feel-good memoir, however, as Brostrom writes in his introduction: “We do not see him evolve and change over time; rather, he repeats this struggle over and over as he passes through the adventures, dangers, and sufferings of his torturous life. He stands in moral judgment over himself at all times, and he sees others first of all in terms of moral, not psychological categories.”
There are moments where, seemingly to the Old Believer’s surprise, Avvakum becomes entranced by his own memories:
We had a good little black hen. By God’s will she laid two eggs a day for our little ones’ food, easing our need. That’s how God arranged it. During that time she was crushed while riding on a dogsled, because of our sins. And even now I pity that little hen when she comes to mind. Not a hen nor anything short of a miracle she was – the year round she gave us two eggs a day! Next to her a hundred rubles aren’t worth spit, pieces of iron! That little bird was inspired, God’s creation.
This may be the first and only time in world literature where a real chicken gets its due respect. Avvakum, like an absent-minded professor, occasionally has to refocus himself on the amazing adventure and tragedy that his life has been: “Once again, let’s get back to my story.”
He expresses disappointment or frustration with God’s plan only once or twice, despite a long series of terribly unfortunate events that have resulted in his being beaten and buried, exiled and threatened, and eventually being left for prey among the wild Siberians:
They leaped around us with their bows. Well sir, I stepped out and hugged them like they were monks, and myself said, ‘Christ is with me, and with you too.’ And they started acting kindly toward me, and they brought their wives up to my wife. My wife likewise laid it on a bit, as flattery happens in the world, and the womenfolk warmed up too. We already knew that when the womenfolk are pleasant, then everything will be pleasant in Christ.
He charmed everyone except for those turncoats who accepted the Greek Orthodox Church’s customs in preference to the old Russian ones: “That wolf Nikon, in league with the devil, betrayed us through this crossing with three fingers.” What a difference a finger makes!
“It is important to be reminded here,” Brostrom reminds us, “that Avvakum and the Old Believers viewed the rules – the canons and laws of the Russian Orthodox Church (the Third Rome) – as unchangeable en masse. They came not from men but from God and were expressions of God’s Will for men in daily living.”
Though a relentless fighter, Avvakum is also an ultimate forgiver: “The devil is wicked to me, but all men are good to me.”
Brostrom’s introduction and notes outnumber in total words the autobiography, as if this volume is meant to be the last translation into English of Avvakum that will ever be needed.
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