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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

Among Hammer’s valued clients was Egypt’s King Farouk, whose American agent Hammer became, allowing him to sell himself as trading ‘By Appointment to His Majesty the King of Egypt’. He wasn’t quite as stately as that implies. Hammer reported in his autobiography that among the King’s peremptory requests were, ‘Buy me a Bakelite factory’ and ‘Send me Lana Turner’. When Farouk was unseated and his loot disposed of at auction, his Fabergé collection was eclipsed only by his library of pornography.

As Faber puts it:

With salesmen like Armand Hammer and collectors like King Farouk, it seems hardly surprising that museum directors still thought of Fabergé as not entirely serious.

I’d say that most of the point of the Fabergé eggs is that they are not entirely serious.

It’s a point that Faber seldom loses sight of, though when he does the effect is hilarious. Of the 1916 Steel Military Egg, he writes: ‘There is no denying the egg’s power to evoke the grimness of the times.’ What a ludicrous thing to say! Nobody in their right mind would set about attempting to evoke the mood of the bloodiest war in mankind’s history through the medium of a decorative egg, still less be judged to have succeeded. It would be like visiting Passchaendale and playing the ‘Last Post’ on a kazoo.

For the most part, though, Faber revels in the sillier details of his story. He conjures at one point a lovely image of Nicholas lying in bed beside the Empress Alexandra, ‘kept awake not by the cares of his office but by his wife, crunching her English biscuits as she lay beside him reading into the night’. He reports on the indignity that befell Fabergé at the coronation: the floor of his coach fell out and he had to run along the ground — upper body erect to keep up appearances. More poignant in its absurdity, he describes how long it took the firing squad to kill the Romanovs’ teenage daughters: the 18 pounds of jewellery hidden in their corsets had made them all-but bullet-proof.

The only thing one longs for in this book is a fuller set of colour plates. I found myself turning the page again and again to goggle at the eggs represented there, and feeling thwarted when some particularly rococo design described in the text did not appear in the illustrations. In every other respect, though, this book is — no, I won’t say it.

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