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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 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.

      1 1 Somewhat different dates for the production and presentation of the perfume (1925/1927) are found in Schlögel, Das sowjetische Jahrhundert, pp. 250–63.

      2 2 Regarding the Chanel No 5. exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, see The Package, Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 1, Fall 1959, available online at https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1953_300190180.pdf.

      3 3 Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia, p. 215.

      4 4 Some attribute the phrase to the Finns, who used it to refer to their weapons in the Soviet–Finnish Winter War; others trace it back to a decree issued by Molotov.

      5 5 Even the exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo takes a Western-centric view of the history of Chanel’s perfume, aside from references to Diaghilev and Stravinski, etc.

      6 6 Constance Classen et al., Aroma; regarding the sociology of smell, see Jürgen Raab, Soziologie des Geruchs.

      7 7 Quoted in Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. v.

      8 8 Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents, pp. 209, 216, 217, 218. Russian research has been collected in volumes edited by Olga Vainshtein, Aromaty i zapakhi v kul’ture; Olga Vainshtein, Dendi; Irina A. Mankevich, Povsednevnyy Pushkin; Olga Kushlina, ‘Ot slova k zapakhu’, pp. 102–10; Maria Pirogovskaya, Miazmy, simptomy, uliki.

      9 9 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 331.

      10 10 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, pp. 50f.

      11 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo, p. 88.

      12 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 408.

      13 13 Konstantin M. Verigin, Blagoukhannost’, and Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, p. 31.

      14 14 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, quoted in Classen et al., Aroma, p. 166.

      15 15 Somerset Maugham, quoted in Classen et al., Aroma, p. 166.

      16 16 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I: Swann’s Way, pp. 60–5.

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