This reminds me of part of the poem,"An Evening of Russian Poetry," in Poems and Problems which I no longer own and is now out of print I believe, but lives on here:
http://www.sapov.ru/novoe/n00-39.htm
But lapidary epithets are few;
we do not deal in universal rubies.
The angle and the glitter are subdued;
our reaches lie concealed. We never liked
the jeweler's window in the rainy night.
--Tim Henderson
David
Haan brought up VN's sentence in SM ("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),
followed by a penetrating commentary that envelops A.Hammer and Clancy
Martin with another matryoshka shell. He added: "Clancy Martin suggests
this has more to do with the Romanovs: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/mart02_.html"
and links a pargraph to VN's sensibility and his dedication to Vera [
as Martin writes:"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[...]
Fabergé, however, wanted to give each egg an individual significance,
with a private (indeed, secret) meaning for the giver and the
receiver."]
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.