Word: headful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...handsome, expensive and definitive study of Fabergé and all his works: Peter Carl Fabergé (Batsford; $35). The exhibition included everything from coffee pots to vodka cups, from imperial seals to paper knives, and from jeweled flowers in crystal vases to a green jade Buddha that nodded its head and wagged its ruby tongue...
Pigs & Cigarettes. Born in Russia of a Huguenot family, Fabergé had probably studied goldsmithing in Paris, but there was no evidence that he had done a lick of manual work on any of the works on exhibition. His genius was in his head and active enough to keep 700 artisans, mostly Finns, busy in his St. Petersburg workrooms. The imperial court was not Fabergé's only customer: every millionaire in Russia clamored for his wondrous candlesticks and parasol handles. In time he produced enameled pigs for the court of King Chulalongkorn of Siam, Buddhas and bowls...
...handsomest egg in last week's show was carved out of rock crystal. Inside it was a golden tree, and perched in the tree was a peacock which, when removed and placed on a table, strutted, turned its head, and folded and unfolded its fanlike emerald tail. The last Fabergé egg to be presented to the Czarina (in 1916) was prophetically grim: made of blackened steel and poised on four bits of shrapnel, it contained only a miniature painting of the Czar and Czarevitch Alexis with staff generals on the Eastern front. Two years later the imperial family...
...about midway, Novelist Vittorini goes off on a wild-swinging tear into symbolism which is part sentimentality, part hallucination. His characters begin to chant lugubrious dirges about the "world's outrages" that sound as if they had been written by William Saroyan with an ice pack on his head...
...loosely knotted together by a narrative that does its best to supply a romantic strand (India harbors a gorgeous American girl who has got herself into hot water by marrying a Siamese prince). But the fruity, feathered hat of glamorous romance is not one that sits comfortably on the head of ex-Missionary Margaret Landon. Her virtues are the warmth of her religious faith and the frankness with which she discusses such delicate matters as jealousy and rivalry among missionaries. The general result is too honest and heartfelt to be scoffed at, but too artless to make a good novel...