Coco Chanel and WHO? Rasputin??

No, they were not lovers. Really!! But there is a connection, albeit a long thin one. Grand Duke Dimitri was one of the handful, led by Prince Felix Yusupov, who murdered Rasputin in Saint Petersburg in December, 1916. Czar Nicholas II sent the conspirators far out of town and Dimitri was sent to a military unit in Persia. In the next year, 1917, it was all over for Czarist Russia and the Grand Duke never returned. Like many other fleeing Russians he ended up in Paris. And who do you think took notice of the aristocrat’s arrival? Coco Chanel. She was eleven years his senior but that didn’t stop either one.

 The French perfume business was booming because the scents didn’t last past eleven in the evening. So they bathed in the stuff. (Can you imagine!) But, as I heard the story, Dimitri said to Coco that she should not sell big bottles of perfume for cheap prices, but small bottles for high prices. He introduced Coco to Ernest Beaux, a successful Russian-born perfumer from St. Petersburg, whose French employer, Coty, would not follow his suggestions. Beaux insisted that the addition of deer musk would make the perfume last the night. Coco hired Beaux, added dear musk to the eighty-some other ingredients and voilà- Chanel No. 5 was born—that was 1920. The Coco-Dimitri affair was in 1921 and while she moved on to others, the relationship in indeed historic. You may have seen the film “Igor and Coco” about her affair with Stravinsky. It seems she liked Russians – famous Russians.

In my next book, “The Lady with the Ostrich Feather Fan” you will learn more about Rasputin’s murder, but it is really about the “life” of two Rembrandts that were the pride of the Yusupov collection and now hang in the National Gallery of Art. More on that later. This perfume story is just one of the many side-stories that emerge when writing.

To read more about all this read “Chanel” by Edmonde Charles~Roux.

Russian Women

In Chapter 38 of “The Domostroi”, which I jokingly call a sixteenth-century, Ivan the Terrible,  version of Good Housekeeping, the husband is admonished exactly how to discipline his wife and children, “…beat them only with the lash, in a careful and controlled way, albeit painfully and fearsomely.” Progress has been made in Russia, but progress, like all else, is in this case relative.

March eighth is Woman’s Day in Russia. Its history goes back to the 1917 Russian Revolution.  Like most things in Russia today, it is controversial. Some say it is a transparent apology for mistreating women the rest of the year, which is to some degree true. Others say that women have come a long way in Russia and are, or should be, grateful for that step forward¾also true. And I said, about ten years ago when I first wrote the essay on Russian Women which is in my book, “Walking on Ice…,) they still have far to go. But things have changed. Russian women today are increasingly at the forefront of society, business, politics.  The Moscow Times reported a few years ago that sixty percent of the new businesses in Moscow were started by women.

Amongst the over sixty employees in my first Russian company a large percentage were women and they were for the most part capable, determined, technically competent, trustworthy, and loyal. I enjoyed working with them. I could depend on them

There is a lot of various opinions about Russian women, some not too complimentary. But in my book, they are unique and fill a very important place in society—in Russia for sure, but also just about anywhere they decide to be. In my book I list six kinds of Russian women: the beautiful, the babushka, the Barbie, the beaten, the bold, and the bewildered. To understand all this you will have to read “Walking on Ice….” Enjoy.

Partially excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

“Suddenly”

The monarchist Vasily Rozanov said that in Russia change happens quickly—in one-and-a-half or two days. Examples given were the Czar and the Army disappearing in two or three days, the elimination of the Patriarchy under Peter, and more lately, the demise of the Soviet Union. One day there was the Hammer and Sickle flying over The Kremlin, and the next day it was gone. The eminent Oxford professor Andre Zorin quoted Rozanov at a Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg in 2004.

 “Suddenly” is a word much used by Russians. I remember in a past writing workshop we were told never to use the word “suddenly” —that only Dostoevsky could use that word. That nothing in fiction happens without a stated or hinted reason. In Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” he uses the word seven times in the first five pages. I used the word in my poem, “Russian Rivers,” “Suddenly, a foreign ray permeates the ice.” In Russian history it is often the foreign ray, or light, or idea, or perspective that drives Russia and Russians–sometimes crazy. Zorin used two words repeatedly in his lecture—“suddenly” and “incredible.” Those two words are apt when discussing Russian history and culture.

I mentioned to Zorin that it seemed to me that, like an earthquake, human events do not usually happen quickly. We feel them in a moment, but underneath the causal elements were long before inexorably moving toward a future explosion. We, on the surface of things, measuring only what our senses tell us or what we want to believe, feel only the culminating shock. I held up my hand and offered that The Russian Revolution started long before 1917—maybe in the 1860s when the artists in St. Petersburg, “The Wanderers,” rejected the European influence and moved near Moscow and began the great paintings of the Russian common man. Other hands went up and the protest was “No, it was the writers like Belinsky, Bakunin, etc. early in 1830s and the influence of the Enlightenment. The Czars were blind to this. Likewise, the Soviet Union was crumbling years before the flag came down, but we didn’t know it or want to know it. (Military-industrial complex pressures?) The Twin Towers collapsed in 102 minutes. Surely the inertia for that disaster began years before, unnoticed or ignored by political leaders.

Then on the other hand, there is the unpredictability of everyday Russian life. Do things happen suddenly, or are the shocks of life always the lack of a preconscious ignorance of predicting clues? If we were so smart to notice and measure all the tremors of coming explosions, we might be prepared for the resulting shocks. But then life, especially ironic Russian life, would not be judged so eloquently by the masters like Dostoevsky.

 Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”