Subject
SIGHTINGS: 12Feb LRB Diary
From
Date
Body
"We drift past the show windows of Fabergé whose mineral monstrosities, jeweled troykas poised on marble ostrich eggs, and the like, highly appreciated by the imperial family, were emblems of grotesque garishness to ours." Speak, Memory, 5.5
Clancy Martin suggests this has more to do with the Romanovs:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/mart02_.html
"The Romanovs did not think of the eggs as a means of exhibiting their wealth; they weren’t, after all, meant for public display. But both the tsarinas, Marie Romanov and her insecure daughter-in-law Alexandra, were certainly known for their extravagance, as was Nicholas II and his father before him. Nabokov and others have suggested that the Romanovs’ fondness for Fabergé pieces didn’t endear them to the average citizen in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and may have contributed to the family’s murder. It’s hard not to see the Fabergé eggs as a metaphor for the Romanov family, that final, ostentatious flourish of European aristocracy: beautiful, hugely costly, useless, even silly. The Fabergé eggs were the end of one idea of Russia."
But this is belied a couple of paragraphs previously, with echoes of all of those dedications to Vera:
"The secret of Fabergé’s enormous success as a salesman was that, unlike the other jewellers serving the royal court, he understood his work to be primarily the making of gifts. Marie Fedorovna first visited his workshop in 1882, and bought a pair of cufflinks bearing an image of cicadas ... Fabergé, however, wanted to give each egg an individual significance, with a private (indeed, secret) meaning for the giver and the receiver."
And in between there's a chicken-and-egg story that smacks of Nabokovian sensibility. But I wonder whether this might also be a swipe at Armand Hammer. And to have all this wrapped within a tale of counterfeiting, Martin's essay has something of matryoshka character in itself.
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync.
http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_howitworks_022009
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/