At the conclusion of the religious service, the Russian Easter festival began. It was an unbelievable surge of eating, visiting and exchanging gifts. Most Russians hurried from the church to begin, in the middle of the night, the sumptuous feasting which broke the long Lenten fast. Because butter, cheese and eggs had been denied, the climax of these meals was
Peter Carl Faberge was a Russian of French descent. At the peak of his success, around the turn of the century, his workshops in St. Petersburg employed five hundred jewelers, smiths and apprentices. He had branch offices in Moscow, London and Paris, and he did an enormous business in silver and gold, especially in large dinner services. His lasting fame, however, rests on the extraordinary quality of his jewelry. It was Faberge’s genius to ignore the usual flamboyant emphasis on precious stones and to subordinate gems to the over-all pattern of the work. In designing a cigarette box, for example, Faberge’s craftsmen used translucent blue, red or rose enamel as the primary material, lining the edges with a row of tiny diamonds. The result was a masterpiece of restraint, elegance and beauty.
Faberge was officially the court jeweler to the Tsar of Russia, but his clients were international. King Edward VII was a regular customer, always demanding, “We must have no duplicates,” to which Faberge could always reply with serene assurance, “Your Majesty will be content.” In a single day in 1898, the House of Faberge played host to the King and Queen of Norway, the Kings of Denmark and Greece, and Queen Alexandra of England, Edward VII’s consort. In Russia, no princely wedding, no grand-ducal birthday, no regimental or society jubilee was complete without a shower of Faberge brooches, necklaces, pendants, cigarette cases, cufflinks, writing sets and clocks. To satisfy his eager patrons, Faberge produced a breathtaking array of imaginative jewelry. In an endless, gorgeous stream, his craftsmen turned out jeweled flowers, a menagerie of tiny animals, and figures of Russian peasants, gypsy singers and Cossack horsemen. His miniatures included tiny parasols, garden watering cans ornamented in diamonds, an equestrian statue of Peter the Great done in gold and less than an inch high, a gold Louis XVI cabinet only five inches tall, and three-inch sedan chairs made of gold and enamel with interiors of mother-of-pearl.
The supreme expressions of Faberge’s art were the fifty-six fabled Imperial Easter eggs which he created for two Russian tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II. Alexander began the custom in 1884 when he presented a Faberge egg to his wife, Marie. After his father’s death, Nicholas continued the custom, ordering two eggs each year, one for his wife and one for his mother. The choice of materials and the design were left entirely to Faberge, who surrounded their construction in his workshops with enormous secrecy. From the first of these commissions, Faberge hit upon the idea of using the egg only as a shell which would open, revealing a “surprise.” Inside, there might be a basket of wildflowers made with milky chalcedony petals and gold leaves. Or the top of the egg might fly open every hour on the hour to elevate a jeweled and enameled cockerel which crowed and flapped its wings.
Faberge’s problem was that every year’s masterpiece made his task that much more difficult in the year that followed. He never really excelled the Great Siberian Railway Easter Egg which he made in 1900. Because Nicholas as Tsarevich had been chairman of the railway committee, Faberge created an egg of blue, green and yellow enamel on which delicate inlays of silver traced the map of Siberia and the route of the Trans-Siberian. The top could be lifted from the egg by touching the golden double-headed eagle which surmounted it, revealing the “surprise” within. It was a scale model, one foot long, five eighths of an inch wide, of the five cars and a locomotive of the Siberian express. “Driving wheels, double trucks under carriages, and other moving parts were precision made to work so that, given a few turns with the gold key … the gold and platinum locomotive, with a ruby gleaming from its headlight, could actually pull the train,” wrote an observer. “Coupled to the baggage car are a carriage with half the seats reserved for ladies, another car for children,… still another car for smokers … [and a] church car with a Russian cross and gold bells on the roof.”
Faberge himself survived the Revolution, but his art did not. With his workshops broken up and his master craftsmen scattered, Faberge escaped Russia in 1918 disguised as a diplomat and lived his last two years in Switzerland. An artist and purveyor to emperors, he had created works of art that survive as symbols of a vanished age, an age of opulence but also of craftsmanship, integrity and beauty.
Along with the palaces and villas of the Russian aristocracy, the seaside hills of the Crimea were dotted with hospitals and sanatoria for tuberculosis. Alexandra often visited these institutions; when she could not go herself, she sent her daughters. “They should realize the sadness that lies beneath all this beauty,” she said to a lady-in-waiting. The Empress herself founded two hospitals in the Crimea, and every year she sold her own needlework and embroidery at a charity bazaar in Yalta to raise money for these institutions. The bazaar was held near the Yalta pier, with the
Nicholas and Alexandra preferred to live quietly at Livadia, but the inhabitants of the neighboring estates followed a lively existence of picnics, sailing parties and summer balls. As they grew up, Olga and Tatiana were invited to these parties, and occasionally, well chaperoned, they were allowed to attend. Even the Tsar’s household life was more active than at Tsarskoe Selo. The palace was usually filled with visitors—ministers down from St. Petersburg to report to the Tsar, local residents or guests from neighboring palaces, officers of the
At Livadia in 1911, to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of her oldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, the Empress gave a full-dress ball. Before the dance, Olga’s parents gave her a diamond ring and a necklace of thirty- two diamonds and pearls. These were Olga’s first jewels, intended to symbolize her coming into young womanhood. Olga was dressed in pink in her first ballgown. With her thick blond hair coiled for the first time in womanly style atop her head, she arrived at the dance, flushed and fair.
The ball was held in the state dining room of the new white Livadia Palace. The glass doors were thrown open and the fragrance of the roses in the garden filled the room. The lights in the chandeliers blazed in clusters, catching the gowns and jewels of the women and the bright decorations on the white uniforms of the men. Afterward, a cotillion supper was served and the dancers strolled in the garden and along the marble balconies at the top of the cliffs. As they stood watching from the palace of the Tsar, a huge autumn moon came up and cast its silver light across the shining waters of the Black Sea.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
