"This book was begun when the menace of an unheard-of calamity was already hanging over humankind; when a generation, scarcely recovering from the shocks of the Second World War, realized with horror that a strange haze was already gathering and thickening on the horizon — a foreboding of a catastrophe still more dreadful, of a war still more devastating."

Daniil Andreev, "The Rose of the World", [I.1.1]

These lines were written by Daniil Andreev back in a Stalinist prison, in the 1950s.
Now we live in the 21st century. But can we truly say that something essential has changed since then? We still fear wars and disasters. Isn’t that so?

Here is what Daniil Andreev writes next.

"These questions are not limited to the problems of war and the state order. Yet nothing can shake my conviction that the gravest dangers threatening humanity now and for centuries to come are a great self-destructive war and an absolute worldwide tyranny. Perhaps in our own age humanity will overcome a third world war, or at least survive it, as it survived the first and the second. Perhaps it will endure a tyranny even broader and more merciless than the one we endured. It may also happen that in a hundred or two hundred years there will arise new perils for nations, no less fatal than tyranny and great war, though of another kind. It is possible. It is likely. But no effort of reason, no imagination, no intuition can conceive of dangers to come that are not linked, one way or another, with these two fundamental ones: the danger of humanity’s physical annihilation through war, and of its spiritual ruin through an absolute worldwide tyranny."

Daniil Andreev, "The Rose of the World", [I.1.10]

Is there a way to escape these dangers, even for a time?
Yes, there is. But to do so, we must stop placing blind trust in the mass media (or rather, mass disinformation) and learn, first of all, to think for ourselves. We must also take full responsibility for our worldview and for our life.

"This book is directed, first and foremost, against these two evils. Against the two fundamental, primordial evils. It is directed against them — not as a pamphlet, nor as unmasking satire, nor as a sermon. The fiercest satire and the most fiery sermon are barren if they only lash at evil and prove that the good is good and the bad is bad. They are barren if they are not founded on knowledge of the foundations of that worldview, that universal teaching, and that effective program which, spreading from mind to mind and from will to will, could turn humanity aside from these two fundamental dangers.

To share my experience with others, to lift the veil on the panorama of historical and metahistorical perspectives, the branching chain of dilemmas standing before us or bound to arise, the vision of multi-material worlds closely bound with us in good and in evil — this is the task of my life.

I have sought, and still seek, to fulfill it through the forms of verbal art, through prose and poetry, but the nature of that art did not allow me to disclose the whole conception with proper fullness, to set it forth comprehensively, clearly, and accessibly. To unfold this conception in just this way, to make plain how in it — though speaking of the otherworldly — there yet lies a key both to the processes of history and to the destiny of each one of us, this is the task of the present book. A book which, if the Lord preserves it from destruction, is destined to be laid, as one of many bricks, in the foundation of the Rose of the World, in the base of the all-human Brotherhood."

Daniil Andreev, "The Rose of the World", [I.1.11]

Don’t you find that the warnings Daniil Andreev gave back in the last century have already come true — and keep coming true? Wars and dictatorships have not gone anywhere. What’s more, dictatorship has engulfed the very country where The Rose of the World was created — a unique worldview book of the twentieth century, and still of the twenty-first.

And who is to blame for this? Politicians, parties, organizations, entire state systems? Yes, they are guilty too. But the greatest responsibility lies with us. Because we do not make use of the knowledge set forth in Daniil Andreev’s book. And we allow crooked agendas and narratives to rule us — our thoughts and our actions. From this flow crooked consequences, including tyrannies, wars, and death.