I remember: I am about three, walking with my mother along the beach at the water's edge. I am happy — the feel of the wet texture of the sand, the sun burning my shoulders, and that indescribable sense of the here and now, as if the whole world existed only around you, created for you alone and for this very moment. Mum bends down and fishes a "devil's finger" out from among the pebbles. And she tells some story about a prehistoric mollusc trapped in amber, millions of years old. My eyes go round. Before me is a great wonder of the world. She places it on my open palm. I clutch it and try to match it to a finger... which one is it, the index or the ring finger?
And then the word amber starts following me everywhere. It is in the names of villages, factories, some silly amateur talent contests, restaurants, and on top of that there are these ugly souvenirs everywhere, festivals.
A funny story happened with one festival in particular. There was a festival called "Amber Panther". It was run by the then deputy mayor for culture. And something didn't quite work out between her and the translators. And the festival was international, or at least it wanted to look that way. So the organisers decided to translate the festival's name themselves. And they did. What they came up with was: Amber panter. English really does have the word panter, and it also has the word panther. The second one is the one that actually means "panther", but for some reason they used the first, leaving out the little letter h. And so Amber panter came from the verb to pant, meaning "to puff and wheeze". That is how we ended up with the wonderful festival "The Amber Wheezer". World-famous.
I never liked amber jewellery. I mean, I would go up to all those kiosks and stalls and could not understand what was beautiful about any of it.
Yes, I saw that through all this ghastly human handiwork a ray of Moroccan sun might suddenly, by chance, flash out — and die beneath that heap of gilded, overwrought metal.
And only almost 30 years later did I see something that truly stunned me. It happened at the Northern Lights festival in St Petersburg. After the opening, the jury and the guests of honour were invited to a small buffet reception. Among others there was the old Michèle "Angélique" Mercier, already crumbling into pieces of flesh, a kind of "ugly duchess". But I saw him at once. He was dressed in an amber-coloured outfit, and on his finger glittered an amber ring of epic proportions. His name was Andrew Logan, and he was a sculptor from Great Britain. We got talking, and it turned out that amber was one of his favourite materials. And I said that I came from the very place where 96% of the world's amber reserves are found. His eyes sparkled, and for the first time in my life I was proud of the word "amber".
But I remember well how, long before that, the word amber literally began to drive me mad. Just then yet another batch of amber guitars, amber necklaces and amber kidneys had appeared.
And I needed to come up with a name for some film festival, and so I decided to outdo them all and called it "Amber Little Amber".
And I went to the then mayor to defend my project. The idea of the "Amber Little Amber" film festival was very simple. You gather 400 spectators in the ZARYA cinema, but instead of showing them a film on a ten-metre screen, you drag a 30-inch television onto the stage and show the films on that. It seemed to me wildly original and a perfect match for the name. When the mayor heard it, he was silent for a moment, and then, without a word, he went out into the next room. He came back with a cigarette. Here is what I want to say. You see what an overdose of amber leads to. People literally start killing themselves.
Of course, I had heard of the black diggers. But in the '90s they weren't called that. They were simply my classmates. Once they came up with the idea of climbing into the quarry and grabbing whatever was lying around. They had a brilliant plan. Wait for darkness and rush in under its cover. And you know, everything happened as in some film. Where one gang in masks runs into a bank, and through another entrance runs another gang in masks that has decided to rob the very same bank at the very same moment. Only in my classmates' case there were more than ten gangs. And even more dogs. In short, they never did get rich.
The first time Mum took me to the amber museum I was about five. The exhibition struck me as extremely small, although I was small myself, and in childhood everything seems bigger. Nothing caught my interest. Except perhaps the inner courtyard — it was lovely to sit there in the sun. And maybe the inclusions too. Not the word itself — I couldn't remember it back then. But rather the attempt to close my eyes before sleep and imagine myself as one of those beetles or spiders climbing up an ancient tree trunk, when suddenly a viscous drop of resin comes down on it. My little legs get stuck in it, my breath catches, I have nothing to breathe, and together we roll into the water, the drop hardens, walling me up for ever.
And I kept wondering whether I die straight away, or whether for a while I can still look out at the underwater world around me through the amber. And the amber, on the contrary, protects me from the aggressive rush of water into my lungs...
Europe learned about amber in the time of the Roman emperor Nero. Some eastern king was due to visit him, and Nero decided to dazzle him. And what better way to dazzle someone than by turning the rays of your own personal sun on them? The first Romans had already been to our parts and had brought back with them an unheard-of sun stone. Nero ordered more. And so amber came into fashion in Rome. They say Nero decorated his palace so lavishly that the eastern king was practically burnt to ashes by its radiance and riches.
And, of course, there's no getting away from the Amber Room. Everyone knows about it.
It was last seen somewhere in the cellars of the Royal Castle, and then it vanished without a trace. I think that in doing so it set the pattern of behaviour for dozens of tonnes of amber that vanished from the Amber Combine.
So there's no need to blame anyone except that very room. But here is what I think. Once a girl named Lena, who was helping me at the time with the EU film festival, made friends with the great Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra. He is the one who wrote screenplays with Fellini and Antonioni, he wrote the screenplay of "Nostalghia" with Tarkovsky. Well, she went to visit him in Italy, told him about our city and the festival and invited him here, and he promised he would try. The festival was drawing near, she called him and called him, and he kept putting off a final answer. And then, when it could be put off no longer, he said:
– Lena, you are a wonderful girl. I will always be glad to have you as my guest. But look. I am an old man now, I don't know exactly how much time I have left. I am invited to every corner of the planet. So tell me, why, out of all those corners, should I choose Kaliningrad?
And Lena was at a loss. She could have said something about Kant, about the Spit, about the region's complicated history, about the 96% of the world's amber reserves, but somehow none of it hung together.
– You know, — said Tonino Guerra, — you need to come up with a legend. A real legend, like the legend of Dracula in Transylvania. There may never have been any Dracula, but everyone goes there to see his castle. Or take Sherlock Holmes... And then everything will work out for you. Everyone will come to you. A legend is more precious than any infrastructure.
And now I think about the Amber Room. About all the hopeless searches for it, all the stories and films. And I wonder why we don't have it. Why the Catherine Palace has it now and we don't. What is stopping us from making a copy? After all, we have 96% of the world's amber reserves. We get it cheaper than anyone else in the world!
This is our legend, after all. It is exactly what can make people come here. I can picture this Amber Room.
It should be hidden in some secret place, perhaps in those same cellars of the Royal Castle. And a quest should be devised. Tourists should be handed a map right at the airport. So that the quest begins right there. So that they arrive and are immediately plunged into this atmosphere of searching for our treasure. That is our chance to become a world-famous place. And until then, we'll go on being the amber wheezer.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
