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Fabergé’s Eggs

Both sublime and ridiculous

Toby Faber
Macmillan, 324pp, £17.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Sam Leith reviews Toby Faber's history of Fabergé eggs

After Fabergé’s exhibit at the 1900 Exposition in Paris, French goldsmiths were described as exclaiming: ‘Louise XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI! Where are they now? In St Petersburg, for we now call them Fabergé.’ That’s not an accidental comparison. Fabergé learned his trade from French antiquities in the Hermitage — and his clients, in the end, went just the same way as the French royal family.

Some of the accidental details of the last days of the Romanov dynasty are eyestretching. A footnote in which Faber enumerates Tsar Nicholas’s full list of titles runs to 13 lines. The Imperial yacht, Standart, had room set aside to stable a cow in order that the children didn’t have to go without fresh milk at sea. Marie Federovna, Nicholas II’s mother, once sighed: ‘What is the use of my 400 rooms at Gatchina? I never use more than two.’

The eggs were and are regarded as totems of the grotesque disconnection of the imperial family from those they ruled. ‘These costly trinkets,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, who visited Fabergé’s shop on Bolshaya Morskaya, ‘appeared to me symbols of Tsarist Russia. Inside that warm and brilliant shop the silly enamelled eggs would be laid out upon a black velvet napkin; outside the rime gathered slowly on the coachman’s beard.’ Vladimir Nabokov — typically — managed to object to them on grounds of snobbery. Riding past Fabergé’s show-windows on a sleigh, he recalls, the ‘mineral monstrosities [. . .] highly appreciated by the imperial family, were emblems of grostesque garishness to ourselves’.

Toby Faber evidently loves the eggs, however, and it’s very hard not to find his enthusiasm infectious. Their kitschiness, their bling, their absurd intricacies and encrustations may seem, well, inelegant to the modern eye; but consider the exquisite achievement of their craftsmanship, and the sheer inventiveness of their designs. From this distance you’d have to be a real sobersides not to see, just slightly, the appeal of such fol-de-rols. Were you the coachman with rime on his beard, of course, you’d take a different view. Hence the Revolution.

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