January 17, 2018

Scents and Scents-Ability


Scents and Scents-Ability
Photo: Netflix

The hero of The Sniffer (“Нюхач”), a Russian-language detective show on Netflix, has a prominent nose but no name and is played by the Estonian Kirill Karo.

The Sniffer is a special investigations consultant who “sees” with his nose. When not on the job, he wears a tiny plastic clip between his nostrils. How it suppresses his sense of smell, we don’t know. The show’s creator, co-writer and director, Artem Litvinenko, doesn’t go for explanations and seems oblivious to making connections to Gogol’s comic story “The Nose.”

Just imagine the Sniffer’s horror if he were called to investigate a barber’s discovery of a nose in his fresh-baked morning roll! “Ivan Yakovlevich stood there absolutely like a dead man. He thought, thought--and didn’t know what to think.” (Иван Яковлевич стоял совершенно как убитый. Он думал, думал — и не знал, что подумать.)

No, the Sniffer is rarely so stumped. When he arrives at a crime scene, he reaches up and plucks the nose-clip out and neatly places it into a plastic box, like kids in my childhood who would take out their retainers when we sat down to pizza. I’m guessing that Litvinenko wants us to understand that the clip obliterates all those random smells that would distract the Sniffer, as they did Dr. Oliver Sacks in “The Dog Beneath the Skin” (in The Man Who Mistook His Wife as a Hat), wherein Sacks, as a medical student having over-stimulated himself with drugs, mysteriously became for three weeks a hyper-smeller. Sacks wrote about that experience in the third-person (he only confessed to the story as his own experience decades later in On the Move):

“He found he could distinguish all his friends--and patients--by smell: ‘I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and redolent than any sight face.’ He could smell their emotions--fear, contentment, sexuality--like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell--he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell.”

At each murder investigation, as the camera whirls around his head, we see what the Sniffer, with one little inhalation, sees: a smoky trail and images of the perpetrator (maybe what Sacks called “a smell-face”) and the series of events. Though I have convinced myself that Litvinenko (who borrows heavily from Sherlock and House) must have been originally inspired by Sacks’ true tale, if he did he hasn’t made use of some of those details yet. The Sniffer doesn’t seem to smell anyone’s emotions. He’s a loner, unempathetic. When asked by his beautiful, engaging ear, nose and throat doctor how long he’s had this extraordinary sensory ability, he woundedly answers, “What does that matter?” Dr. Tatyana Voskresenskaya (Nina Gogaeva) thinks he would make a good subject of a book – an idea that seems to peeve him. Sacks was much cheerier in his hyperosmia (super-smelling), but perhaps that’s because the experience was all new to him.

There is an odor of embarrassment that pervades this farfetched, politically incorrect, slick series. When Sacks remembered his experience of hyperosmia, he was not embarrassed but fascinated: “Smell pleasure was intense – smell displeasure, too – but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him.” But sad sack Sniffer doesn’t reflect on his lot, as Sacks did. “Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction,” writes Sacks, “he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.” When the Sniffer has his nose on full-power it doesn’t lead him away from but toward “categorisation.” In his lab, free of sound and people, dealing only with chemicals and his memories, he is obviously deeply reflective. He’s no dog.

He is amazing, but he gets no respect. Everyone – criminals, colleagues, witnesses – can’t help sneering a bit at the Sniffer’s ability. It’s embarrassing to solve crimes that way, they all seem to agree. And if there’s a crack in the slickness and entertaining conventionality of this show, it’s this: No one really wishes they had the Sniffer’s talent! He’s got it; he’s stuck with it. All it brings him are riches that don’t make him happy.

But what if the Sniffer awakened one morning like Gogol’s Major Kovalev, and looking in the mirror saw a space as flat as a blini? And then, in his scent-blind hunt for it, encountered it on Nevsky Prospect? “How was it possible… that his nose that had just yesterday been on his face, unable to ride or walk, was in a uniform!” (Как же можно, в самом деле, чтобы нос, который еще вчера был у него на лице, не мог ездить и ходить, — был в мундире!)

What a story! – “The Nose” – not to mention The Sniffer: “Still, if you think it over, truly, there’s something to it.” (А все, однако же, как поразмыслишь, во всем этом, право, есть что-то.)

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
The Samovar Murders

The Samovar Murders

The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.
Murder and the Muse

Murder and the Muse

KGB Chief Andropov has tapped Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso’s wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
Murder at the Dacha

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
Fearful Majesty

Fearful Majesty

This acclaimed biography of one of Russia’s most important and tyrannical rulers is not only a rich, readable biography, it is also surprisingly timely, revealing how many of the issues Russia faces today have their roots in Ivan’s reign.
Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955