Why are Fabergé eggs?
Eggs?
The answer, and I promise you this, it is surprising.
It changed how I think about royal history.
And also. Yeah, eggs.
“A superb green gold imperial Easter egg by Fabergé.” “I
like another Fabergé piece.” “Fabergé.” “Fabergé.”
Before I started this video, I knew nothing.
I thought Fabergé eggs were the province of really cheesy videos.
The Fabergé egg is a masterpiece of design,
impressing your elderly neighbors and your grand aunt.
Like. Like that.
But before they were collector's items for really rich people
like the Forbes family, they were specific
gifts.
What we call Fabergé eggs are the imperial Easter eggs.
They were all made by Carl Fabergé’s firm
between 1885 and 1917, 1917.
I hate to tell you, there was this whole revolution in Russia.
Things got crazy.
(Internationale plays) Now, before
these imperial eggs, jeweled eggs were popular in Russia.
I took shot of some of the pendant eggs in the museum,
and there were just lots of eggs that were all around the place.
Another popular thing was big,
hulking diamonds, like this one that Catherine the Great had.
But you didn't have that Faberge egg middle ground.
Fabergé existed, but they were a relatively small firm.
In 1885, that all changed.
Fabergé became part of the royal inner circle and jewelry became art.
The Fabergé imperial egg, a beautiful, bejeweled egg
that contained a surprise inside,
became a Russian institution for about 30 years.
Why? Let's talk about egg bombs.
No, actually, let's talk about Dagmar.
Then we will get back to the egg bombs.
I promise.
You see, those first Fabergé eggs were a gift for her.
So she's kind of the key.
They had Fabergé pictures of her in the museum.
She's born in 1847, known before marriage as Princess Dagmar.
Gosh, that is...that is not the best princess name.
Not going to lie, Elsa.,Elsa is a better princess name.
Russia is open to flirting with Denmark.
So Dagmar gets engaged to basically the Russian Prince, Nicholas.
And then he promptly dies.
And his dying wish is that his brother would marry Dagmar.
It’s like, awkward, but sweet, too.
She does. She marries Alexander.
So let's just kind of orient ourselves here.
You've got this Danish woman who is suddenly interwoven into Russian royalty.
She is Russian royalty.
It's this intricate intertwining of her personal life.
And the state....
the state is in tumult at this period in time.
The nihilists are on the rise.
This is a whole very complicated movement that I'm not going to pretend
to summarize.
But let's just say that typically the anti-establishment movement people
aren't huge fans of those Danish princesses who marry into Russian royalty.
In 1881, Nihilists actually blew up her father in law.
Like, literally, she was at the palace and watched him die.
Terrifying stuff.
And then in 1883, two Easter eggs are sent to the palace.
One says, “Christ is risen.” The other says, you know,
actually I'm going to do this in a Russian accent.
“You act like you may crush us but
we nihilists will rise again.” Is that good?
I feel like that was really good? That same year, Moscow police get an egg
stuffed with dynamite and a threat on Maria's husband's coronation.
And in 1885, Alexander is like, What can I do to make this a little better?
Is there any sort of present I can give her?
He goes back to the personal.
He wants to give her an Easter egg
that will actually mean something, not just be jewelry.
I mean, I don't know.
Honestly, if I were him, I would stay away from the eggs,
considering all the bad egg stuff that happened.
This is like if the Easter Bunny murdered your family and you were like,
“Here, this is a nice bunny.” I'd be like, no, no more bunnies.
I’m done with the bunnies.
But I digress.
I'm not here to critique Alexander's gift giving anyway.
He wants a good egg, and he commissions Carl Fabergé
to make the first Fabergé imperial egg.
It is actually really simple.
An egg with a hen as a surprise inside.
But this is where the story gets interesting,
because that egg is really a copy of a famous Danish egg
that Dagmar almost certainly knew from her childhood as a princess.
Look at these eggs side by side.
So Fabergé eggs are eggs for all of these reasons:
violent Russian history, egg bombs, plus
Princess Dagmar’s warm and fuzzy feelings about Danish eggs, plus Fabergé's
super unique skills with enamel, a material that other people found
really hard to master.
The other Fabergé eggs continued the trend of having all sorts of little messages
inside throughout this 30 years, but the meaning is the same.
It is a personal gift for public people.
Fabergé’s firm, they made a lot of other stuff like this sailor,
but the eggs remain the most famous.
So why should we care today?
Well, listen, I was totally ignorant about this.
I got to see the eggs.
They're really very pretty.
Also, I think you can make a strong argument
that Carl Fabergé was the Steve Jobs of egg making.
These eggs were designed by allowing independent shops
to kind of operate on their own.
And then every once in a while, Carl would bust in and say how much they sucked.
One quote is that he went in and he reportedly smashed an object
with a hammer and said, “You can do better.” But for me,
the resonant thing is that it shows how personal royal politics really was.
I imagined a
lot of power jockeying and hollow gestures.
I mean, when you hear Danish princess marries Russian
prince, you're, like, envisioning lines on the map.
But Fabergé eggs, they were actually personal gifts.
I mean, that first egg that was a gift from a husband to his wife
to try to remind her of her childhood after a terrible five years.
That's actually a nice gesture, even though today it's ended up
in a museum.
I used to think of these as weird collector's items.
Now they're like the the jewel that the lady at the end of the Titanic drops.
You know, it's like there's all this meaning in it.
Inside that first egg is not just a hen, but a real gesture of consolation
from a man to a woman who had suffered a lot
and moved away from home, from Denmark to Russia.
But at the same time, outside those Fabergé eggs
was an impoverished, chaotic nation.
And that was part of the point.
That contrast Alexander and Fabergé wanted to create,
a world where Maria Federovna could be Princess Dagmar again, where
the surprises weren't at the end of palace halls
or in bombs under carriages, but delicately encased
inside an egg.
Hey, that's it for this one.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel
where I do history videos, culture videos, stuff like that.
I'd love it if you subscribed for more videos or left a comment.
If you think I left anything out about the Fabergé
story, the Faber-story?
My main source for this was actually this book, Fabergé Eggs by Toby Faber.
I've been calling him Tony in my head all this time.
But I thought this was like a pretty cool book actually, and I enjoyed it.
So yeah, I've got a link to that in the description and otherwise.
Thank you for watching and try not to get too bummed out
by the tale of the Romanovs and just just enjoy the surprises in the eggs.
Should I go Ferris Bueller on you here?
Life's a lot like a Fabergé egg.
You got to crack it open to see the surprise inside.