In 1873 little Anya Ulyanova copied a poem by the poet Konstantin Korenev on a beautiful piece of paper. She put the paper in an envelope, signed it ‘To my dear father’ and gave it to Ilya Ulyanov for his birthday. On October 13, 1929, she herself gave the envelope and postcard to the House-Museum. The original papers are kept in the funds, and the exhibition presents their exact copy.

The author of the poem, Titular Counsellor Konstantin Korenev, was an assessor at the Simbirsk Civil Chamber in 1838. Korenev’s lyrical poems were published in the magazines ‘Russian Conversation’, ‘Morning Dawn’ and ‘National Notes’, in the collection ‘Yesterday and Today’. In the 1840s, he moved from Simbirsk to St. Petersburg, where he wrote this poem.

A sheet with a poem is folded in half; part of the text is hidden inside. On top of the first page, Anya made a transferable picture — red flowers, bunches of blueberries, green leaves. This method of transferring an image from paper to other materials is called a decalcomania, or decal. French engraver Simon Francois Ravinet invented this technique in 1750. He applied paint on a heated copper engraving, made an imprint on heavy paper, which he then imposed on a varnished surface, such as the side of a vase. The paper drawing stuck to the varnish, and Ravinet wet the paper and carefully washed it off.

In 1840, the Russian sculptor Alexander Terebenyov received a patent for a simplified method of imprinting images on tableware. The picture was typographically printed on paper with a thin layer of glue. Such a picture was wetted in warm water and applied to the surface, after which the glue on the film soaked, and the image was transferred to the flat surface.