"Don"t lose your nose: what did the "sun King" bedroom smell like and what is "olfactory silence"?

In the introduction to his book on the role of smells in history and culture, Argentine science journalist Federico Cukso explains his methodology, which combines a scientific-historical approach with a literary one: "... to understand and feel what smells the world was filled with in each past era, does not mean to simply suck in the air. This is not a whim of our senses, but a way to understand the story more deeply, allowing us to enter into closer emotional and bodily, physical contact with its characters." The critic Lidia Maslova found out how much he managed to carry out such a grandiose plan specifically for "Izvestia".

Federico Kukso

"Odorama: A Cultural History of Odors"

Moscow : Alpina Non-fiction, 2026. Translated from Spanish — 544 p.

"Odorama" is structured chronologically, although the author often returns to examples from the past to understand modern cultural processes and their root causes. The first part, "Smells of Yesterday," contains suggestions about how the Earth could have smelled immediately after the Big Bang, and tells about the aromas of Ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, and Greece, gripped by the plague of the Middle Ages. It also talks about how long before the invention of the telegraph, telephone and social networks, long-distance communication was carried out using smells: "Cultures and societies far from each other were connected by trade in expensive goods: precious stones and fabrics, perfumes and aromatic essences." The chapter ""Masks of the Sun King"" reveals the relationship with scents and perfumes at the French court: the main characters here are Catherine de' Medici with her reputation as a poisoner, as well as Louis XIV, known as the "most fragrant monarch."

Louis XIV's Bedroom

Photo: Global Look Press/Martin Siepmann

From the bedroom of the "sun king", whose morning toilet, filled with a variety of smells, is described in great detail, Kukso is transported to Latin America. In olfactory terms, the key historical event for him is the "fetid conquest", which brought not only new smells to the culture of the Mexica, Incas and Maya, but also new microbes to which the Indians were not immune, which is why, 100 years after Cortez landed in New Spain, the indigenous population decreased from 25 million up to 2 million.

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The second part of the book, although called "Smells Today," also contains a lot of historical information, starting with the struggle for deodorization of Paris at the end of the 18th century, which reflected a shift in public consciousness towards unpleasant odors, which were previously considered something self-evident, an inevitable companion of human life.: "There was a process of changing olfactory behavior in society, caused by progress in chemistry and medicine, as well as, of course, the aesthetic sophistication of the new bourgeois class and the ever-increasing amount of industrial waste. Immunity to unpleasant odors was a thing of the past. The noses of society have finally woken up."

Photo: Global Look Press

And in the age of Enlightenment, what Kukso calls olfactory silence came, when the sense of smell ceased to be considered a source of knowledge about the nature of things, and sight became the main organ for conquering nature and scientific discoveries. The effect of odors on the emotional sphere, which is too subtle and difficult to formulate precisely, "contributed to the fact that the sense of smell began to be perceived as a threat to the abstract impersonal mind." In addition, at the household level, the absence of odor has become the main sign of compliance with hygiene rules — unlike in previous eras, when immersion in water was considered dangerous because of the bacteria contained in it, and the smells of unwashed bodies were actively masked by strong-smelling substances (in which Louis XIV achieved special virtuosity).

"However,"as odors were banished ("pleasant, bad, vague, monstrous and incomprehensible") from the 19th century, they found refuge in literature, "on the pages of books by those authors who considered them the most important aspect of human experience, human relations and knowledge of the world around them." ""Of course, the first and most expressive example here is Marcel Proust with his famous scene from the novel "Towards Swann," where the smell of Madeleine biscuits transports the lyrical hero through time and space. However, Cookson confronts the lyrical Proust with such an ardent opponent of the romanticization of smells as Sigmund Freud, who categorically believed that the sense of smell is generally a relic of the past, an atavism like an appendix, which it would be good to get rid of. ""If Freud had met Marcel Proust, he would undoubtedly have considered him a pervert," sneers Cookso, who believes that the authority of Freud, who attacked smells and advocated the creation of an ideal aseptic atmosphere, spurred "the development of social odorophobia and the demonization of smells inherent in modern society."

"Russian classics" ""Odorama"" also found a place in the literary segment of the 19th century: quoting a fair fragment from Gogol's novella "The Nose", Kukso explains that in his absurdist work Gogol "satirically responded to the fashion for deodorization that swept Europe." """" Demonstrating his well-read nature, the Argentine journalist also mentions Ivan Turgenev, who described in the story "First Love" and the novel "Fathers and Children" "the aromas of the peasant world and the Russian nobility." ""Crime and Punishment", where Fyodor Dostoevsky conveyed "the unbearable stench of inns, poverty, loneliness and moral decay of a big city", clearly made a strong olfactory impression on Kukso.

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"""" But still, in the final part of the Odorama," "The Smells of Tomorrow," one feels that the author of the book would rather choose an "unbearable stench" than the complete absence of odors or the deodorized sterility to which the modern world tends. This is also due to the advent of virtual reality: "The digital era has become the apotheosis of olfactory silence, which began to assert itself in the world 200 years ago. We willingly touch keyboards and screens, and enjoy absorbing a stream of images and sounds. But we negate the smells. It's like they don't exist, they don't participate in our interaction with the outside world." ""Besides, the marginalization of odors and their public condemnation lead to the fact that a "civilized person" who has broken with animal instincts lives in constant anxiety: "We are forced to <...> intensely control any daily "uprisings" of our material nature: the fear of having bad breath, shame from body odor. After all, it can offend others or, even worse, embarrass us and turn us into outcasts."

Photo: IZVESTIA/Anna Selina

The advent of synthetic odors that have penetrated into all spheres of life (Cookso, among other things, examines in detail the rampant use of "selling odors" in marketing) can undoubtedly be associated with a parallel transformation of human thinking, increasingly relying on artificial intelligence. "Moreover,"Cookso uses the phrase of the British paleoanthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark as the first epigraph to his research, paraphrasing Descartes' famous aphorism and putting the sense of smell ahead of consciousness: "Olfacio ergo cogito" ("I smell, therefore I think"). Given such a close connection between the olfactory situation and the mental one, a person of the third millennium can only complain with the intonation of Mikhail Zhvanetsky: our smells are increasingly synthetic, and our intelligence is quite artificial.