The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [38]
K is for Konigsberg: 'see Kaliningrad'. Between articles on 'Modern Dance for Balls' and 'How to Make Better Work in Cultural Area with People from the North' there is a reference to a Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) story: 'Successful return of Professor Alexander Brusov and Tatyana Beliaeva from Konigsberg, 13 July 1945.'
Brusov. However, a librarian informs us that the article has gone missing. We return to the catalogue room, waiting for the Bs to become free.
B is for Beliaeva and Brusov - nothing listed. But in a decrepit almanac of Soviet museums, we find: 'Brusov, Alexander Ivanovich, Professor of Archaeology, State Historical Museum, Moscow'. And a telephone number.
The man Moscow sent to Konigsberg in search of the Amber Room held a prestigious post in an institution at the heart of the Soviet Union, housed in a red-brick Gothic-style building at the western end of Red Square. We call the State Historical Museum from the library payphone. 'Brusov. Brusov? Nyet, the switchboard operators says, hanging up.
We try Our Friend the Professor. Can she extract some information from the tight-lipped Moscow museum world? She'll see what can be done. 'Everything is forbidden but all things are possible,' the professor choruses. 'Wait by the phone.'
Twenty minutes later, she calls. 'Alexander Brusov is dead. In 1965,' she says. Nothing is ever straightforward in our Russian lives. 'But I gather there are some papers of his. Classified. In the Leninka. The Lenin Library in Moscow. I might be able to get you copies.' The chances of us getting classified files opened are slim. Copies are fine, we say. I have a colleague in the Leninka and she will try and send the papers to you in the National Library of Russia,' the professor says. 'Please be patient. Do nothing.'
We wait, on tenterhooks, like Kuchumov. However, while Anatoly Mikhailovich waited for the return of his Amber Room, he began some new research into Konigsberg. And while we wait for news from the Leninka, we go in search of a book from which, according to Kuchumov's diary, he took notes in May 1945. 'Study P. J. Hartmann,' the curator wrote, as Brusov set off for the Baltic, taking the place Kuchumov believed should have been his. We are not good at doing nothing.
Succini Prussia, physica et civilis historia was published in Frankfurt in 1677 by Philipp Jacob Hartmann, a 'professore medicine extraordinario'. The book's patrons spared no expense in binding the text in caramel-coloured calf hide, in commissioning engravings for the frontispiece and bookends. It was an exposition on the origins of amber and Hartmann concluded that it was 'undoubtedly petrified vegetable juice'. His book became a bestseller, one that generated such interest in the year it was published that the celebrated British physicist Dr Robert Hooke, who would discover the laws of elasticity and energy conservation, led a series of discourses on Hartmann's theories at the Royal Society in London.3
The debate about amber's genesis was still raging at the time Tsar Peter I became entranced by the Gold of the North and bought a copy of Philipp Hartmann's book when he travelled to Konigsberg in 1696. The book's appendix reproduced the earliest eyewitness account of the amber trade in East Prussia, written by Simonis Grunovii, a Dominican monk who arrived in 1519 in an area that was then known as the Samland Peninsula.
Grunovii wrote that he wished to buy a perfect nugget of amber to give his Pope, from whom he hoped to buy