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Erin:Welcome to T2A as we learn about the extraordinary craftsmanship behind the delicate, eye-popping, jeweled eggs of Carl Faberge. Toby Faber chronicles the amazing journey of these imperial objects that grew from a seemingly plain, white egg Faberge created for Russian Czar Alexander III in 1885. Mr. Faber’s new book is Fabergé's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire. Let’s start with a question from Ethiopia: ------------------------------- Wondwossen, Ethiopia (email):What initially sparked your interest in the history of Faberge’s Eggs? Why did you decide to write this book? What are you hoping readers will take from it?
Toby:I like the idea of being able to tell stories through objects rather than people. My first book took that approach with Stradivarius violins and I thought I could do the same with Faberge's eggs because they have the same aura of being masterpieces by a maker everyone has heard of and would like to know more about. Then as I delved more deeply into it I realized they do tell a most remarkable story not just about themselves as eggs but about Russia and its relation with the West. On the one hand you have the egg design which reflects something of what was then going on in the lives of the Czarinas who were receiving them -- in that way they're fabulous almost an illustrated history of the decline of the Czars -- then you have the story of what happened to the eggs after the Revolution, which has a very satisfying arce to it...as they come out from Russia to the West and now in the last few years they've started being bought back by the oligarchs who are in some ways successors to the Czar. ------------------------------- Hannah:Did you make any unlikely or surprising discoveries while researching and compiling this book?.
Toby:The discovery was more about myself really. I started the book for the reasons I just gave, also conscious that these eggs are the last word in decadence and many are vulgar and many are totally over the top, so what I didn't really expect was how much I would grow to appreciate the eggs as works of art as well which I now do. Some of them really are the most remarkable objects and certainly worthy of the place in museums they now have. ------------------------------- Erin:I've visited The Hillwood Museum here in Washington, D.C. several times and each time I marvel at the eggs in display there. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to possess something like that. Just amazing.
------------------------------- Hannah:Please give a little background about the eggs, and what they symbolized, for those that may be unfamiliar with their history.
Toby:You have the general idea of eggs as an Easter gift, a symbol of the re-birth of spring tied up with the Resurrection. That goes back to Pagan spring rituals. In the court of Louis the 12th or 13th people were already starting to exchange decorated jeweled eggs and that practice was imported into Russia. So certainly the eggs that Faberge made for the Czars to give to their Czarinas were not the first jeweled Easter eggs. But he took it to a whole new level. ------------------------------- Hannah:You’ve talked about the way the eggs represented a divide between the Russian czars and their subjects. Could you elaborate a little more on this assertion?
Toby:The most way is that these are amazingly opulent objects and they embody the divide between the wealth of the Czars on the one hand and the abject poverty in which 95-percent of their subjects lived. It was only in the 1860's that the serfs had been liberated and when these eggs were made in the 1880's and 1890's their children were still living in squalor, crowded into one room which they shared with their animals and eking out a subsistence living from their farms. The other thing that is striking about the design of the eggs is how many of them derive from the designs that were first used in the courts of Louis the 15th and Louis the 16th of France, another royal line which ended in revolution. One can say these sort of over the top concoctions symbolize the excess that comes with the end of an era. As I say in the book they could only have been commissioned by a court disconnected from the country it was intended to govern. ------------------------------- Erin:The eggs have gained and lost favor and monetary value over the years—can you explained what caused these fluctuations?
Toby:The Russian Revolution coincided with the First World War and it brought the sequence of the eggs to an end along with the death of the Czar and the end of Faberge's firm. And for 15 years after that, Faberge's creations were very unfashionable. In addition to that, the world was poorer, there weren't so many people around who could afford to pay for these things. So we see an egg which cost perhaps the equivalent of 20000 dollars to make at the turn of the century being sold for less than 2000 dollars in 1930. They then began a gradual climb back up towards their current status. It involved all sorts of people, one was Armand Hammer, who employed marketing methods that might at best be described as dubious, but who undoubtedly succeeded in introducing Faberge to America. On the other side, there were the collectors and the most prominent of them was Malcolm Forbes, who almost single handedly drove up the price of Faberge, boasting that the sale room records he broke were almost always ones that he himself had established. Now there's a whole new generation of purchasers and most prominent among them are of course the Russian oligarchs -- it would be fair to say that any investment in Russian art over the past decade would have paid substantial dividends. Faberge eggs are the most prominent example. ------------------------------- Erin:What was the Faberge workshop, and what became of it after the Communist Revolution and the end of czarist rule?
Toby:He was no lone craftsman. He was the owner and manager of a large enterprise employing up to 1000 people in St. Petersburg and Moscow and with sales offices elsewhere in Russia and in London. He was clearly a business genius as well as having an excellent design eye. His system resolved around semi-independent workshops, each headed by a senior workmaster. They were responsible for fabrication, while Faberge's company took responsibility for designs, for supplying materials and for selling the finished objects. The Communists took over the workshops in early 1918 but then the Russian economy was by then collapsing and the workshops shut down toward the end of 1918. Faberge and all his family eventually succeeded in fleeing, although Carl Faberge himself died in 1920. ------------------------------- Toby:I think they have acquired the significance of being the most potent symbols of the Czarist Regime. The Communists did so much to erase the memory of the last Romanovs, from hiding their bodies to turning their palaces into offices. But the eggs always remained as a permanent reminder of the craftsmanship and wealth that flourished in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Now of course the Romanovs' bodies have been discovered and the palaces are once again tourist destinations. But I think that the symbolic power of the Faberge eggs is so firmly established that it can't be lost. :
Erin:Thank you Toby – that wraps T2A chat with Toby Faber, who chronicles the journey of the Faberge Egg in his new book is Fabergé's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire. Our thanks to Toby and to you for joining us. We hope you can come back Thursday, October 23rd at 1845 hours UTC when we meet former British First Lady Cherie Blair. as she speaks freely about her life before, and during her days at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Tony Blair and their family. That’s Thursday, October 23rd at 1845 hours utc right here on voanews.com See you then!
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