Читать книгу The Scent of Empires - Karl Schlögel - Страница 9

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, by contrast, says of himself: ‘My genius is in my nostrils.’¹¹ And: ‘Tell me, my animals: these higher men, all of them – do they perhaps smell bad? O pure smells about me! Only now I know and feel how much I love you, my animals.’¹² The Russian perfumer Konstantin Verigin harks back to Arthur Schopenhauer, who refers to the sense of smell as ‘the sense of memory, 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’.¹³ And one of the most ruthless observers of the twentieth century, George Orwell, pinpoints smell as the deepest distinction between the classes: ‘The lower classes smell . . . For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.’¹⁴

We perceive not only with our eyes, our perception not only comprises images, and our memory adheres not only to iconic and emblematic signs. Just as there is a ‘noise of time’ and every epoch has its own sound, every age has its own scentscape. The generations who grew up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, whose rites of passage involved border crossings, such as the Friedrichstrasse station between East and West Berlin or the Cheb crossing on the old German–Czech border, will probably always have an olfactory memory of those borders. Even after a long period of enlightenment and distance from the specific smells that usually have negative connotations, even now that the world has been progressively deodorized, we cannot simply catapult ourselves out of the realm of scent. We perceive the world not only with our eyes, but also with our nose. The rhythm of the seasons materializes not only in shades of lightness and darkness, but in shades of smell – the scent of snow on the air, a fresh spring breeze, the heat of summer weighing down on cities and fields, the mustiness of autumn leaves. 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. We ride in buses where, depending on the temperature and time of year, the perspiration of bodies pressed close can prove stronger than the deodorized layer in which we swathe ourselves each day. We inhale the sharp, almost fruity aroma of petrol at service stations and the generic smell of department stores and supermarkets, where all the differences between an endless variety of goods have melded into a stew of odours difficult to describe.

The slightest disruption to our everyday smells – uncollected rubbish, for instance – pops the deodorized bubble in which we usually live, causes irritation and unease. We must make an effort to bear a stench. We suffer not only from the tyranny of intimacy, but from the world of smells produced by that intimacy. We do not want it to touch us. Progress is measured by the suppression of stench, and what we consider pleasant or repugnant is an aspect of the lordship–bondage relationship described by Hegel and Marx: the struggle between the centre and the periphery, between above and below, between people living in close proximity, between the West and the non-European world. The spread of the ‘sanitary convenience’ is as reliable an indicator of civilization as the establishment of a parliamentary order – at least according to Somerset Maugham.¹⁵ The smell of progress in the industrial age, the belching smokestacks and chimneys, has been followed by an odourless postindustrial digital economy, and even the creation of smoke-free zones in restaurants to guarantee a pleasant dining experience. In the language of political agitation, the ancien régime lands on the ‘trash heap of history’, and the new era dawns like a paradise with its attendant paradisiacal fragrances.

Literature is full of smells: the scent of flowers, the ‘smoke of the fatherland’ (Fyodor Tyutchev), the pungency of Soviet Belomorkanal cigarettes. The catastrophes of the twentieth century involved not only apocalyptic landscapes but also the gas of the gas chambers, the stench of the smoke rising from the crematoria, the stink of the camps in which people were left to rot away while still alive. Smells and scents have their own production time and their own expiry time. Smells linger long after regimes have fallen and ideologies have faded – and vice versa. Cycles of scents do not coincide with legislative periods. They live by their own time. Scents can survive revolutions.

The ‘scent of the big wide world’, as one cigarette brand billed itself, was once associated with the horizons opened up by Pan American Airways. Generations are divided not only by their changing tastes but by their signature scents. Wars create a din and also generate smells of gun smoke, burning and corpses. The air that follows a thunderstorm is fresh, cleansed. We cannot describe the most banal aspects of present or past without mentioning times and places, but nor can we avoid mentioning tastes and smells. We need not debate which of the senses is given priority: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. Images impress themselves on our memory, but smells take hold there as well. It requires no more than a breath of air and the hint of a scent to bring whole scenes to life in our mind: the waxy smell of a parquet floor, a school stairwell, the aroma of a stationery shop, a gymnasium, incense billowing from a censer during Holy Mass, the smell of petrol from a car – be it an Eastern Trabant or Western Ford.

The odour of an age clings to all phases of life, and it cannot be wrong to take this into account when reconstructing the past. The ‘ur-scene’ in this process must be the madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which a small cake dipped in a cup of tea triggers an ‘all-powerful joy’ as soon as it touches the narrator’s lips. Proust’s description of the sense of taste must surely also apply to the sense of smell: ‘No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.’ What follows is several pages of reflection on what had been unleashed by that sensation of taste. There is no logical conclusion, only ‘evidence of its felicity’:

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period in my past life. . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

The memory is of a specific place, a specific day, a specific scene:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Everything comes flooding back, the water lilies, the people of the village, their little houses, the church, all of Combray and its environs, all of it ‘taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea’.¹⁶

If this holds true, then the history of perfume and the luxury goods industry is not just a subset of social reality. A drop of perfume is time captured in scent, and the bottle is the vessel that holds the fragrance of time. The fascination with perfume bottles currently in evidence in post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere is more than just a quirk, it is its own ‘search for lost time’. The post-Soviet Proust is probably already on the prowl.

The difficulty of actualizing a past scentscape is obvious. The eye can fix on images that have been drawn, documented and reproduced – infinitely rich and differentiated, multi-faceted visual worlds. The ear has access to musical scores, recordings of the aural fabric of a city, the burst of a fanfare before a mass march, the voice from an interview, the speech on an important occasion. Noises and soundscapes can be recorded, retrieved, read, reproduced – everything from chiming bells to loudspeakers. Instruments can be recreated. But even with the most refined biochemical analyses now available to us, where do we stand when it comes to smell as a source of information that is supposed to be reliable, ‘intersubjectively reviewable’ and ‘objective’? Materials have their smell, flowers have their fragrance. In the chemical age, scents can be generated and reproduced at will. But they do not last forever. There is no archive of aromas in which odours can be stored for all eternity and retrieved again. Scents evaporate. They can be described, but for all the richness of language, the description of a scent comes nowhere near the experience of perceiving the infinite nuances of an aroma through the sense of smell, and certainly not through the professionally trained sense of an expert. Attempts to pin down the ‘pitches’, nuances, voices and spheres of scents in perfumer’s organs and written compositions, to objectify them and make them ‘readable’, are no more than approximations and aids for the novice.

It is no coincidence that histories of fragrances tend to focus on the vessels that hold them, the bottles that continue to exist long after the last traces of the volatile oils and essences have evaporated. They give form to the olfactory composition. The bottles become symbols that are synonymous with the scents they contain. This is why wherever you find bottles, you will find perfume archaeologists: in antique shops, on the many websites run by vintage communities, and in the fragrance categories on eBay. Many cities already have perfume museums, including Paris, Versailles, Grasse, Barcelona, Cologne, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Much more material will come to light as collectors crawl around in attics and discover bottles of precious exotic scents carefully preserved by grandmothers despite the greatest hardships – the flotsam of past epochs. Amongst all the exhibitions and archives of scents, a special place would have to be reserved for a museum of smells featuring the jars in which the Stasi in East Germany stored scent samples from dissidents, which they used to train and drill their sniffer dogs.

The book at hand will have to make do with the capabilities of a historian who is aware of his limitations, has no laboratory of scents at his disposal and did not train as a perfumer. What he does have, however, is a notion that there is not just a ‘noise of time’ (Ossip Mandelstam) but also a ‘smell of time’ – that we move not just through soundscapes, but through scentscapes. If we want to take our leave of the twentieth century, we should do it with all of our senses. We can follow the traces of Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow as we do so. Let us go back to their mutual starting point, their pre-history. We will track down the authors of the fragrances, who generally do not appear on the labels on the bottles. We will see how history diverges and realize that we are always dealing with more than just a vial of a precious essence – we are dealing with the world concentrated within it. And we will see that what befell the creators of these fragrances in the course of the twentieth century was both asymmetrical and unjust.