Every book, no matter what its subject matter, is written by a specific person, living in a given era, at a given time. This book is no exception. It bears the stamp of the time in which it was written and the stamp also of the author's personality against the background of his life and fate.

What traits, then, created the special blend of character possessed by the author of The Rose of the World and many works of poetry, which together with The Rose, form a single, integral, and altogether unprecedented phenomenon in the history of culture?

First, since early childhood, he manifested a pronounced creative impulse - more precisely, a poetic impulse -- together with a heightened sensitivity to the sound of words. Writing became the meaning and driving force of Andreev's life, the performance of duty laid upon him from above.

Second, he was given a passionate love of history -- especially Russian history -- as a living current in which all our lives flow in what is by no means a passive relation.

Above all, he was one of those natures that is filled with an innate, organic religiosity, a religious faith that was an integral part of his being, the very foundation of his self. For such people, the world is never completely closed off. "Another" world is always showing through "this" world. In The Rose of the World, Andreev calls the works of those who are open in this way "transpatent realism".

Finally, he was an artist. There are devotees of art as there are devotees of faith. daniel Andreev was such a person. He wrote the first draft of The Rose of the World in his cell in Vladimir prison and completed it in the twenty-three months of homeless wandering that remained to him before his death.

Humanity's long history knows the type of creative personality we may call "the spiritual visionary". The most famous people of such a creative type in the West are dante and Swedenborg. Daniel Andreev was likewise such an artist. He was not a member of any "school". The states of special vision that had been conferred upon him since his early teens and that grew in prison into the sustained and brilliant light of transphysical knowledge were a gift of the Forces of Light. This is a rare gift, it is true, yet it is one that occasionly encountered.

Prayer -- and, before his arrest, church -- was the only thing that helped the author attain the states that formed the foundation for writing The Rose of the World. At the beginning of the book, he recounts that one of the first times he awoke to a living consciounsness of the world of Light was in a church, during the acathistus of St. Seraphim of sarov, whom he held in particular reverence all his life.

He called the kind of knowledge of the world practiced by spiritual visionaries "transphysical knowledge". His personal spiritual experience helped him form a comprehensive picture of the universe. That experience informed his work. While in prison, Andreev wrote drafts for his three main books: The Rose of the World, The Iron Mystery, and Russian Gods.

In The Rose of the World, Andreev states his main ideas in detail in prose. The Iron Mystery and Russian Gods express the same ideas in poetry.

For Andreev, the universe is many layered. The plane inhabited by humanity, Enrof, in Andreev's terms, is the middle plane. Above stretch the shining Worlds of Enlightenment, while the dark Worlds of Retribution oppose them from below. All religious cosmologies contain a structure of the universe of this kind: for instance, the Vale of Life, Hell and Paradise in Christianity; Midgard, Niffleheim and Asgard of Scandinavian mythology; and the Seven Heavens of Islam. Andreev's worlds of Enlightenment and retribution develop the same structure.

Each of the worlds described by Andreev has its own name and purpose. For example, one of the worlds of Light, Iroln, os the abode of the immortal monades of humanity. Monads are made by the Creator, and the evil of the world does not touch them. The entire system of the planes comprising the many-layered world of each planet is called a Bramfatura. The Bramfatura of the Earth is called Shadanakar.

Every nation creates its own culture, which is different from other cultures. Here Andreev analyses two notions that are closely connected with each other: the supranation and the metaculture. The latter at once embraces the culture created by the nation on Earth, touches upon the lower planes connected with the demons of state systems, and blossoms in the Heavenly Countries or Zatomis that shine over each nation. These Heavenly Countries are free from evil and they never perish, even when the mundane reflection of the Zatomis that we experience as the culture of a particular nation dies on Earth.

Thus, there is a shining Heavenly country being built over Russia -- Heavenly Russia, Holy Russia. After physical death, the righteous -- saints, heroes, and completely unknown people -- ascend there in order to continue their labors for the glory of God.

The life of the Universe is the continuing struggle of the Powers of Light with the Powers of Evil and darkness, who are allied with the being who was once the First Angel and rebelled against God and is now building his dark Universe. Evil is a phenomenon that has no roots in the Creator and is doomed. This is the cardinal difference between Andreev's concept and manichaeism. This struggle between light and dark is now the very essence of life. Consciously or unconsciously, in all ou deeds, thought and actions, we all participate in this oopsition of Good and Evil.

For Andreev, creativity, too, acquires a special meaning. There are people in the world of art whom Andreev calls "heralds" -- they are artists in the broadest meanings of the word who have the gift and the duty to link Enrof and the Powers of Light. In this way, human creativity takes on special responsibility, since the artist on earth gives a form of life to something that cannot otherwise manifest in our world. This goes for images of both Light and darkness. Many works of art created by poets, musicians, architects and painters are rooted in worlds parallel to ours. Having acquired form on Earth, these works in turn come to life in one of parallel worlds and are able to influence us from there. The abodes of Christ and the Mother of God, together with the vision of the Holy Cosmos, appear in unattainable heights. The anticosmos oppose them from below.

Andreev sees nature as living Essences who surround us and interact with us. He calls them Elementals.

This many-layered structure of the Universe and the ongoing struggle of Light and Darkness led Andreev to the vision of the Rose of the World. An epoch will come on Earth when the life of a united humanity will be governed by a single moral authority. Then Christian churches will unite and form a free union with all religions of Light. This epoch Andreev calls "the Rose of the World".

here. especially, one must bear in mind the nature of times in which Andreev lived. One must try to picture its concrete spiritual conditions.

Nowadays, the countless human abuses and acts of cruelty of those times, not to mention the pervasive denigration of the human individual, are well known. But no statistics can convey what was most important: the atmpsphere of rampant anti-spirituality, the palpable daily penetration and intertwining of one's whole life by forces of Darkness -- demonic forces. Anything connected with religion was considered a crime. Atheism was not merely the state religion, it was an aggressive program invested with unlimited powers to destroy everything we call "spiritual". Such a time gave rise to a vital sense of adversaries in active opposition: God and Devil. From this point of view, anyone who served God within his or her confession or was quietly groping for a way in that direction was an ally.

In Andreev's novel, which perished at Lubyanka prison, there was a scene that gives a key to understanding what he called open and harmomious relationship with other great world religions -- The Rose of the World. The character, Glinsky, a schlolar of Indian culture and the leader of an underground group of idealists in Moscow that is engaged in erecting an invisible edifice in spiritual opposition to the era, is arrested. The scene is a cell crowded with people of different classes and backgrounds in the Lubyanka prison in 1937. There are interrogations. Everyone is faced with the same hopeless future. Sharing a cell with Glinsky are a Russian Orthodox pries and a Mullah. Without a word to each other, these three all take turns saying prayers for everyone else. Silently, whenever one of those praying is taken away to be interrogated or has no strength left, he passes on his prayer vigil with a look to one of the remaining two... Scarcely any pries would condemn such people, no matter how impermissible their spiritual practice may be from a canonical standpoint.

This is not a desire to luxiriate simultaneously in several warm pools of different religions and spiritual teachings but a desperate alignment of the sprirtual community of those who are with God, in God's name -- whatever different paths they may follow -- against those who oppose God. Such is the tragic "ecumenism" that was born in the prisons and camps of those godless times. The character of Daniel Andreev will always bear the stamp of an era that has already become a legend for younger generations.

Daniel Andreev is a child of Russian culture, where boundaries are always slightly blurred. This means that he solves problems that border on philosophy and sometimes theology on a poetic level. Poetry is a specialvision of the world. One can understand this phenomenon only by going back to ancient times when there were no "poets" in the modern meaning of the word, but religious, philosophical images were expressed by human beings through the Word. It is in this sense that Andreev should be called a poet.

Such is Daniel Andreev's personality. A man of the tragic twentieth century, his work deals with the most important and most painful problems of our lives.