Scentzilla!

I am delighted to take part in the “From Russia with Love” cross-site review project for fragrances from Russian perfumery. To read the reviews of other participants, please visit Aromascope, Perfume Posse, and Perfume Smellin’ Things.

As some of you may know from reading earlier posts of mine, I have a distinctive connection to Russia. My ancestry is mostly German and Dutch. (Never tell a dutchman that he’s really “just German,” because you seriously don’t want to go there.) But much of my heritage is actually Volga Deutsche; As a matter of fact, one side of my family is composed of nothing but Germans from Russia. Catherine the Great was the first to open her Russian kingdom to recruit German citizens. She wanted them to settle and farm upon open lands in Ukraine, and the invitation was accepted over 100 years later by my own family. Most of them emigrated near Odessa to the village of Güldendorf, now known as Krasnoselka. I am not Russian or Ukrainian by blood, but those places are significant to me. I need to forewarn that this post is going to end on a bummer. So let’s start with the fun stuff instead - mostly perfume reviews from the Russian Novaya Zarya house. You can click on the individual fragrance names to find where to buy them in the US.

Green Vetiver: *Sniffs* green Froot Loops. With grass. Mmmm, who doesn’t want to wake up to a bowl full of that in the morning. Okay, so maybe there’s some lemon grass* note in there, but still!! I’ll pronounce it wearble, but once I thought of Froot Loops I couldn’t shake the idea, and it’s ruined for me. *Lemon grass was my guess upon smell, but as written this note is listed as verbena. Feh, whatever.

Carnation: Oh this might be a swoon-worthy charmer to many of you. If you wanted to love Floris’ iconic Malmaison, but just couldn’t come around to it because of the powder, then this is the carnation for you. Cloves and white floral goodness, with a dab of warm brown vanilla at the base. I would trade in Malmaison for it in a heartbeat. Lovely. Of all the Novaya Zaryas I tried, this is my hands down pick for a “must try.” From now on when anyone asks for a good every day carnation perfume, I’m going to start recommending this one. Worth discovering for the perfume-nut crowd at large.

Iris (Melody of Flowers collection): I do like this, but I’d never buy it. It’s a “perfumey” perfume. This clumsy stab at an iris bouquet smells quite like ozonic air to my nose, with sprigs of green leaf and a slight woodiness at the base. I’d cite it as the conventionally prettiest of the bunch I tried, but Iris reminds me too strongly of the old-fashioned perfumes my grandmother’s friends used to wear. I could never feel comfortable in it as a result, I’m afraid.

Arome Musque: Arome Musque vaguely reminds me of Henri Bendel’s Wild Fig. Sweet, with the vanillic smell of Fig Newton cookies, or possibly even Apple Newtons, this scent is not a standalone musk. Pleasant enough. It’s just not my bag, baby.

Muguet - Pleasant, but forgettable. It opens with what I can only describe as some nameless greenish note. It reminds me of a cheap white rose incarnation, rather than directly of eponymous lily of the valley. Then there’s something almost acidic to the whole quality of it. Inoffensive overall, but I’m lumping this into a “must miss” category.

Patchouli Magique: Remember how I once boiled CB I Hate Perfume’s Patchouli Empire down to “Chrismas and sex?” Patchouli Magique opens as “Christmas and heavy flirting.” It dries down into a rather nice “outdoor cafe in a park and casual flirting.” There’s something slightly circumspect about this classical-leaning take on patch, musk, and what I am guessing must be a vanillic note to soften the effect. I think if someone slapped a chi-chi niche brand name on it, and began charging a hundred bucks a bottle for it, all the perfume nuts would suddenly climb all over each other like silly lapdogs to get ahold of a sample of it. Pretty, and worth the trouble of sampling, though don’t expect the earth to go all shattery or anything.

Okay, ready for Captain Bring-down? Because here I am, and I have a story to tell.

Russian Forest: I am having an extremely difficult time with this scent. Dearest Marina has sent me samples of this fragrance before, and yet I could not bear to try it until now, and this only out of guilt to her. You see, the very mention of Russian forests conjurs up such negative connotations in my mind that the name alone makes me shiver with sadness. I think of those poor souls sent to suffer, and better yet die, by the Soviet government into forests under the most evil of pretenses. They were “enemies” of the “people” because of their German heritage. Yet, they were not really German at all, being separated from the motherland by countless years and successive generations of Russian and Ukrainian births. The sheer majority had never so much as touched German soil. As Stalin grew in power, German-Russians were packed up like cargo into train cars. Some were simply executed by the Soviet soldiers or the NKVD. If they were lucky they were exiled, with most of the women and younger children sent to fish and lumber in harsh Siberian conditions, many with little to keep them warm. Most German-Russians came from Ukrainian lands, and had not an inch of Siberian-appropriate clothing to take with them. Some people even lacked so much as shoes. They found even less to keep them fed. The retributions for eating even a speck from their small harvests of grown produce or fish came swiftly… and fatally. The food was to be shipped to the “Soviet patriots” only, primarily to keep up appearances to the Russian populace that all was going well with the Soviet’s Kollectiv system. Finding vermin or bugs to eat was a godsend. Some of the men who were left alive were busy trying not to die as slave laborers at Kolyma. Some men were exiled to work as forced labor inside mines in Kazakhistan, and were unable to look for their families until a long while after Stalin’s death. The one book that left the deepest impression on me is called The Dark Abyss of Exile : A Story of Survival by Ida Bender. Ms. Bender is not a professional author. But so little is understood of the diaspora of the Germans from Russia, that her plaintive tale stands as valuable testimony against the genocide that occured under the Soviet regime. Her literary witness stands in for my family in absentia. The only relative of mine that I know the exact cause of death for is my grandfather’s grandmother, my great-great grandmother. And even that I’m not certain of. This was simply the hearsay that happened to reach the States before all hope of contact was lost. Or maybe they just guessed. The story goes that one evening at supper she simply lowered her head on the table, who knows, maybe as if in weary thought, and died. Presumably she perished by starvation, under the Bolshevik leadership’s deliberately exacerbated famine (1920-1921.) From my various readings, I guess it was common during this period for the elders of the Germans, Poles, Armenians and Ukrainians to stop eating voluntarily, so that there would be more for the young people. But I did not know her, nor did my grandfather, and neither of us have her words. I have only read the direct testimony of Ida Bender. So when I hear “Russian Forest” I am left with a mental image from Ida’s stories, of trying to fish barefoot in icy rivers before a spring thaw. I am haunted by her story of what happened to a young woman she worked with, who was raped repeatedly by her Soviet-officiated boss and rewarded for her pain with meager and ruined food, while Ida and her young female friends labored as lumberjacks in Russian forests.

So, let me compartmentalize, and simply describe the smell of Russian Forest. I smell fresh ferns, soap, and what I’m guessing is supposed to be a weak cade note (woody phenolic, I suppose.) The fragrance mostly smells not of notes, but of a blurry image of an idealized Russian Forest in the mists such as the one pictured on the frontpage image at woodfromrussia.com. I think it would be a fine, though slightly dull choice for either or men or women. Just not me. Not me. I cannot manage to emotionally extract myself from the name.

Rather than show the bottles, I thought it might be more fun use some art by interesting Ukrainians and German-Russians. The image at top is titled perfekte Entsorgung (2005) by a German from Russia named Maria Tribus. You can find out more about Maria Tribus by clicking here, and you can see much more her work by clicking here. I actually recommend that you view the image I used in full size to appreciate the detail. She’s wonderfully talented. The second image is entitled Iris, Ukraine (1942) by Ukrainian artist and architect Vasyl Krychevsky. A summary of his life and work can be found by clicking here. The last image is the first one that popped into my head when thinking of Russian forests. It is by a German from Russia of the older generation who lived through the banishment and deplorable living conditions. His name is Andreas Prediger, and his painting above is one of several that are visual records of what happened. This particular one is called Sibirische Treidlerinnen (1941) which translates in English to ‘Siberian ??’ It’s okay, I don’t think we need know the title to understand the meaning. I really encourage you if you have time to look at the paintings on his site at www.andreas-prediger.de (pop-ups must be enabled.) Click on the text that reads “bilder-galerie.”