Tsar's Trinkets Tell a Tale

Faberge eggs have something ridiculous about them. Encrusted with a dazzling array of stones and composed with delicate intricacy, they look as likely to be found on a Moscow souvenir stall as in a museum. But there is also something fascinating and curiously attractive about these "turn-of-the-century trinkets," as one museum director disdainfully called them.

Toby Faber's book, "Faberge's Eggs," tells the epic story of how their intricate craftsmanship, garish beauty and unique reputation took them from tsarist Russia to capitalist America and back, passing on the way through the hands of owners as colorful as the eggs themselves.

The first egg was gifted by Tsar Alexander III to his wife Maria at Easter in 1885. He engaged the St. Petersburg jeweler Carl Faberge to produce an egg capable of having "the desired effect" on its recipient. After the assassination of Alexander's father in 1881, the terrorist threat against the Romanovs remained high. The "desired effect," Faber writes, was not only to delight and surprise his wife, but also to soothe her.

Faberge and his craftsmen fulfilled his customer's wishes with the Hen Egg. Based on the design of an egg in the Royal Danish Collection, it would have reminded the tsarina of her happy childhood as daughter of the king of Denmark. The white enamel egg opened to reveal a gold "yolk," inside of which sat a gold hen with ruby eyes, an imperial crown and a ruby pendant.

Maria's reaction convinced Alexander to place another order the following year, and a Faberge egg soon became an annual Easter gift. The eggs' designs were increasingly left to Faberge's own imagination, with only three stipulations from the tsar: The gift should be egg-shaped, an original design and contain a "surprise."

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Faberge was a shrewd businessman. He urged his craftsmen to push the boundaries of enamelwork; he logged the time that each worker spent on an object; his son, Eugene, was employed as a "public relations man."

A large part of Faberge's success lay in his understanding of his clients, enabling him to oversee the creation of increasingly personalized eggs. It is this personal element to the eggs that gives Faber his narrative: "Taken as a whole, they provide a magnificent perspective on the lives and preoccupations of Russia's last tsars."

After Alexander III's death in 1894, Nicholas II continued the tradition of giving eggs at Easter -- one to his mother and one to his wife, Alexandra. "Public event" eggs, commemorating Nicholas' coronation and achievements, such as the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg in 1900, were interspersed with eggs with a much more personal theme. The increased focus on the imperial family and their life as the eggs' subject, Faber argues, highlighted their growing alienation from the world around them, their longing to retreat from their public roles to an idyllic family life.

Faber retells the well-worn story of the downfall of the Romanovs from a sympathetic, family angle. He paints a picture of an inevitable revolution brought about by the inward-looking Nicholas' inability as a statesman and the vast disconnection between the tsar and the people. It's certainly one way of looking at the Revolution, and the sheer opulence, even grotesqueness of the eggs, against this background, gives this particular narrative a strong peg.

Although there is sometimes a sense that we've heard it all before, the story is retold fluently, with some nice details about the imperial family's lives, such as the cow kept on the imperial yacht, Standart, to provide the children with fresh milk at sea.

The best parts are when the eggs drive the story and Faber focuses on interpretations of their symbolism, even if they do at times seem rather fanciful. Saying that the 1916 Steel Military Egg's somber tone displays the "power to evoke the grimness of the times" is surely far-fetched for a Faberge creation costing a small fortune.

Vladimir Filonov / mt

By the time of the Revolution, 50 imperial eggs had been produced. Despite the worth of their constituent parts and connection to Russia's past, the eggs did not predominantly suffer the fate of much of the imperial jewelry, which was broken up and sold abroad.

It was thanks to entrepreneurs, who bought the eggs in Russia for a song, that the eggs eventually came to the West. Some reached the collection of Queen Mary, wife of Nicholas II's cousin George V; still more reached the United States through the work of Armand Hammer -- oil baron, staunch Republican and, as Faber quotes one art critic, "Stalin's U.S. field representative." The Soviet government needed to raise foreign capital, and Hammer's art dealership, he writes, served as "little more than a front for the Soviet government."

But the Faberge eggs were his, and he hit on the best way to maximize his profit -- by targeting the U.S. capitalist elite, who could afford the price tag and would respond to the romantic portrayal of the vanished world of the Romanovs as a golden age.

Magpies tend to gather around glittering objects, and the book is bursting with fascinating, even ridiculous characters. The Linskys, a couple of poor Russian origin who made their fortune with an innovative stapler design, were told by the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to collect more serious things when they offered their Faberge collection for display. King Farouk of Egypt bought three eggs from Hammer and also sent him more outlandish requests, such as "Buy me a Bakerlite factory" and "Send me Lana Turner."

Random House Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces that Outlived an Empire By Toby Faber Random House 320 pages.$30

And then there was Malcolm Forbes, the greatest Faberge egg collector of them all. The owner of Forbes magazine was a conspicuous consumer who flew around in an airplane named after his publication's tagline, "Capitalist Tool," and made it his mission to buy up every egg on the market.

But the eggs were not destined to stay in the West forever. Just as in early 20th-century America, so the capitalist boom in 1990s Russia was characterized not only by its ostentatious opulence but a hankering after a fictitious past. When the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg purchased the entire Forbes collection of eggs pre auction in 2004, he was, Faber suggests, insuring himself against the same fate as Mikhail Khodorkovsky by returning to Russia part of its cultural heritage. The eggs had been brought full circle by the tsar's "modern-day successors."

Faber has done a commendable job with this potentially unwieldy tale. It's a lively, enthralling read: The narrative rarely loses pace or interest, and his personal fascination with the eggs comes through strongly, even if sometimes a little too much so in his generous interpretations.

The frequent changes in time and place are held together by the impression of the eggs as a symbol of wealth, luxury and ostentation that links late imperial Russia, mid-20th century America and modern Russia. But Faber also points to another, more interesting reading of people's fascination with the eggs: They are a kind of delusion, a powerful metaphor for a distant, romanticized, glorious Russian past, which people the world over yearn for and want to own a part of, but which was never really that glorious. Hence the Revolution.