The theme of the spring issue of Hermitage Magazine is illusions.

Art is ready to deceive us in everything. Realism, ethics and beauty - when put to the test - turn out to be doubtful constants for art. In art deception is multifaceted and legal. The director of the State Hermitage's Department of Western European Art, Roman Grigoriev, gives us his thoughts about illusions as a genre and about art as deception.

Petersburg's own illusions are fireworks, illumination and other "curious" spectacles. These have always been an essential element of official festivities and a favorite pastime of the public. In the 18th century according to Petersburg historian Yevgeny Anisimov.

Charley Chaplin considered cinema to be a "great illusion." But optical illusions entertained the public long before the invention by the Lumiere brothers. Philologist and cinema expert Yan Levchenko thinks the difference is in the "grandeur," i.e., in the scale of illusion." The reasons for the wild success of the culinary utopia - the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food - may be found in the reply of philologist Ilya Kalinina, "Between Reading and Digesting."

Dmitry Krymov is an outstanding stage producer. Under him the RATI course for theatre designers put on a number of shows in record fast time that earned cult status. Yan Levchenko and Olga Roginskaya chatted with Dmitry Krymov in high level language.

Over the course of nine months photographer Yuri Molodkovets took pictures of the Hermitage at night. His project is the first in the history of photography to present night-time shooting of a museum.

What does a mirror reflect when nothing is next to it and no one is looking? The mirror in fine art is the subject of a survey by Arkady Ippolitov in the magazine's section called "Iconography."

"The Museum Beyond the Looking Glass" is a photo session by Alexander Kitaev, a well known Petersburg photographer who found places in the Hermitage that his camera had not previously looked in on.

The magazine section "Collection" presents the once celebrated Moscow museum of Henri Brocard (Genrikh Brokar). It so happened that one of the main Moscow attractions of the 1890s has gone without serious study both during the life of its creator and after his death. However, the collector's contemporaries had an inkling about the value of the collection of the French perfume maker, which numbered many thousands of items.

Robert Storr is a professor, art historian, the author of a great number of monographs and catalogues and dean of Yale University's School of Art. He knows everything there is to know about art. As one of the most celebrated curators of modern art exhibitions in the world and Commissaire of the 2007 Venice Biennale, he knows everything about the art market. Yelena Kolovskaya, Director of the Pro Arte Institute, talked with him about art and a lot more.

New works in the list of the hundred most expensive art works according to the auctions sales of 2006 and advice about investments in art objects are the subject of the article in the "Art and Money" section written by Sergey Skatershchikov.

In addition there are remarks about new old things and the eminent London hotel Brown's, relations between museums and the markets, the Hermitage as seen by Lewis Carroll, as well as news about auctions, reviews of exhibitions and books, festivals, concerts, announcements of the best upcoming exhibitions in Russian and foreign museums --- all in the spring issue of Hermitage Magazine.

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Hermitage Magazine, Spring 2007 No. 6