Throughout his career, Hesse was preoccupied with thoughts about the fate of the world, art and civilization. The writer began working on his main novel, The Bead Game, a couple of years before the Nazis came to power, published it in 1943, the turning point of the Second World War, and in 1946 he received the Nobel Prize for it. In this "joyfully mysterious book," as defined by Thomas Mann, written in an atmosphere of universal militarization and barbarism, Hesse asks the main question - how to save the individual and the spiritual principle during the collapse of culture and the general decline of morality?Without trying to portray the realities of a global catastrophe, he proposed his own path – escape from society, escape into the world of "pure art" and the search for "eternal truth", to the beautiful fictional country of Castalia, where the intellectual elite of the future selflessly indulges in a Game of beads. Due to the complexity of its construction, the interweaving of many genre forms, the richness of symbolism, terms and concepts from various fields of culture, the novel was not understood and accepted by everyone, but immediately generated heated discussions and became a spiritual guide for entire generations around the world. The edition also includes the allegorical story "Journey to the Land of the East".