FOREVER AMBER.(reconstruction of Amber Room in Russia's Catherine Palace)

On September 17, 1941, the German Army took the town of Pushkin, in the Pulkovo hills south of Leningrad, and immediately proceeded to occupy the Catherine Palace. Originally a gift from Peter the Great to his wife, the palace had been expanded into a Russian version of Versailles--an enormous wedding cake of a castle, with pavilions, follies, and royal baths--and, later still, it had been converted by the Soviets into a state museum. Its collection, assembled by the Romanovs, comprised some thirty thousand paintings, sculptures, silver place settings, and French porcelains, but by the time the Nazis arrived the palace was practically empty. During the Germans' advance, the women of Pushkin, working in three shifts, day and night, had packed up the museum's holdings and carted them off for safekeeping. They had managed to remove just about everything of value except the chamber known in Russian as Yantar'naya Komnata, in German as Das Bernsteinzimmer, and in English as the Amber Room.

Amber, in mythology, is the tears shed for Phaethon after his fall; in scientific terms, it is a partially cross-linked polymer. From an artisan's perspective, it possesses several appealing properties. It can be polished to a high gloss, or cut into thin, translucent sheets, or carved with fine designs. It is soft (not much harder than a fingernail) and light (roughly the density of water). Since Neolithic times, amber has been used to make jewelry and amulets; starting sometime in the sixteenth century, workshops in northern Europe began to invent new uses for it, such as pipes, chess pieces, and inlaid boxes. The Amber Room represents, by several orders of magnitude, the largest such work ever attempted. Three of its walls were covered in panels reaching to a height of thirteen feet, and each panel was covered with a seamless mosaic of amber tiles. Many of these tiles were ornately worked into the shape of flowers and weapons and Biblical figures; others were pieced together to form crests and royal insignias; and still others were underlaid with foil and embossed with tiny, elaborate scenes of sailing ships and country life.

Why the women of Pushkin left the Amber Room behind is not known for certain; they probably just didn't have the time to box it up, or the means to transport it, or perhaps the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old panels seemed to them too fragile to move. The Nazis, for their part, immediately recognized the importance of their find: within hours, the panels had been taken down and were on their way to Germany, from which they never returned.

Of the tens of thousands of art works to disappear during the Second World War, the Amber Room ranks as the most significant, and the most avidly pursued. It has been hunted on both sides of what was the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic Coast to the Thuringian hills, in caves, jails, churches, salt mines, tunnels, bunkers, ice cellars, and shipwrecks. Before the Stasi, as the East German secret police was known, was disbanded, it systematically investigated some hundred and fifty possible hiding places, at one point spending more than a million dollars to excavate a clay pit south of Leipzig. (In the process, the Stasi compiled a dossier on the Amber Room that ran to a hundred and eighty thousand pages.) Although many have dabbled in the search--the Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon, for example, was a member of an international Amber Room club, founded by a Russian baron living in exile in Liechtenstein--for some it has turned into a life-consuming, even life-depriving, obsession. One of the most dogged of all Amber Room hunters was a West German fruit farmer named Georg Stein. Starting in the mid-nineteen-sixties, Stein pursued the room for more than two decades, deciding--incorrectly--that it had been buried in a mine shaft near Gottingen. His search left his family destitute, and one day he was found naked and dead in a Bavarian forest, his stomach sliced open with a scalpel.

Conservative estimates put the value of the room at a hundred and fifty million dollars. It is clear, however, that this price, which is, in any case, hypothetical, is only a small part of the equation. The Amber Room is desirable because it is beautiful and rare and unlikely. Even when it was new it was exquisitely fragile, and now it is lost.

On a cold, gray morning this past January, I set out for the Catherine Palace to visit what is known as the amber workshop. The goal of the workshop is to replace the missing Amber Room with an exact replica. Depending on how you look at it, this ambition perfectly parallels the effort to find the original or else completely contradicts it.

The director of the project is a forty-seven-year-old stone carver named Boris Igdalov. I met Igdalov in his office, which lies at the back of the workshop, at the end of a warren of oddly shaped rooms strewn with drawings, diagrams, and little plaster models, all coated in ...