The book consists of popularly written essays on individual works of painting, sculpture, graphics and applied art stored in the collection of the State Russian Museum in Leningrad. If you enter the halls of the Russian Museum for the first time, you can envy how jealous you are of a person reading Onegin or War and Peace for the first time, listening to Tchaikovsky for the first time, seeing Battleship Potemkin for the first time... It is a joy to climb the heights of art again and again. And the first "rise" can shake. Your joyful amazement, first born by Lermontov's poem, Prokofiev's ballet, Levitan's landscape, over the years turns into a constant need for more and more new encounters with the beautiful. And if at different stages of life you reread your favorite book again and again, from year to year you listen to the symphony that excited you, then you return to the Russian Museum, where canvases and statues, drawings and engravings bring a person closer to beauty.