The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [62]
The next morning, the same file of greetings cards is waiting for us on the table and the director is not expected back for several days. We might as well read what we have.
'In celebration of your eighteenth anniversary as a Leningrad Museum Worker, from your friends and collaborators': this first greetings card is illustrated with a sketch of a scene in a library; rows of desks, and sitting at one a bespectacled researcher, sandwiched between two great towers of files. It looks like the Bolshoi Reading Hall in the National Library of Russia. The next card shows the same man in a black suit, pushing a weighty wooden wheelbarrow of books, a pork-pie hat balancing on top of them, their spines embossed with the words 'Archives', 'Extracts', 'Documents'.
Caricature of Anatoly Kuchumov at his desk researching the fate of missing Leningrad palace treasures
Caricature of Anatoly Kuchumov with a wheelbarrow of books marked 'archives, extracts, documents' in which he researched the reconstruction of missing treasures from the Leningrad palaces
'Upon your 47th birthday': a card edged in red from 27 May 1959. Here is another ink drawing of a plump man in a black suit striding purposefully across the page, a scholar with a forelock and little round glasses struggling with a tome under each arm inscribed 'arkivie\ Falling all around him, against a backdrop of the Leningrad palaces, are multicoloured parachutes that, on closer inspection, cradle pianos, chairs and candelabras, the returning treasures of the tsars. Inside is written: 'To Anatoly Mikhailovich from your grateful comrades at the Pavlovsk and Catherine palaces.'
1962: 'On the occasion of your 50th birthday, 27 May.' A lilac card with gold trim. Inside is a watercolour of a figure swathed in a blue toga, riding a chariot accompanied by a phalanx of maidens in lilac robes. Small photographs of faces have been pasted on to all of the torsos. The charioteer is Anatoly Kuchumov, his sylphs curators at the Leningrad palaces, including several faces that we recognize from the House of Scientists.
That year Kuchumov also celebrated his thirtieth anniversary as a Leningrad Museum Worker, and greetings were more formal: 'From the Workers of the Western European Art Department at the State Hermitage; heartfelt congratulations to you. We fully appreciate your great knowledge and Soviet patriotism, your acute taste and good eye that is so important.' Eight members of staff from the Alexander Palace also sent salutations: 'Many people died and were scattered to the winds by war. But we were all joined by former times to the Alexander Palace, where you were once director. We thank you, Anatoly Mikhailovich.'
The pile is several inches deep and it takes us all morning to pick through to the bottom of the box. One card catches our attention. It is from Kaliningrad, the Soviet name for Konigsberg, given to the city in October 1947 following the death of Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Sent on 27 October 1975, the card is decorated with a bouquet of blue irises and contains the dedication: 'Dear Anatoly Mikhailovich, from our hearts congratulations on your honourable notation. We wish you health, creativity and success and we invite you as our guest, members of the Expedition, Chairman Storozhenko.' An expedition in Konigsberg. It may have been connected to the Amber Room. We note the name of the chairman, Storozhenko.
There follows a dedication written by Valeria Bilanina, the vice-director of Pavlovsk Palace, on 27 November 1977:
Why, my brother, are you lying in bed?
You have left us in trouble and now this year is nearly finished.
I can hardly carry my burden alone.
When it is all over we will all lie in rows.
Kuchumov, Kuchumov, Kuchumov!
Take notice, you must have more courage and instead of medicine you must have good health and return to our