The Rose of the World by Daniel Andreev is a unique and poetic cosmological treatise passionately written out of personal experience. It offers a prophetic call for the spiritual reunification of all people and an open and harmonious relationship among the great world religions. For Daniel Andreev, whose mystic revelations are often compared with those of Dante and William Blake, the Rose of the World is a spiritual flower whose roots are in heaven: each petal is a unique image of the great world religions and cultures, and the whole flower is their joint co-creation with God.

Andreev, the son of the famous Russian writer Leonid Andreev, was born in 1906. Coming of age in the new Russia of Marxist-Leninist atheist materialism, he recognized the incompatibility of his gifts and propensities with the values ruling in society. Secretly, by night, he wrote poetry and prose that could not be published.

Andreev was arrested in 1947 for reading his writings to a small circle of friends. Accused of creating an anti-Soviet group and even planning a terrorist attack on Stalin, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a political isolation prison. Everything Andreev had written was destroyed.

In prison, however, his visionary capacities were enhanced. "A new stage in metahistorical and transphysical knowledge began for me," he wrote. "Long rows of nights were transformed into sessions of uninterrupted contemplation and formulation." It was in prison that he was given his powerful mystic experience and the visions which formed The Rose of the World. He managed to record them as accurately as he could.

Andreev was freed in 1957, his health ruined. He lived for less than two years thereafter. During this time he completed The Rose of the World; he knew he would live just long enough to finish this book. He died in March, 1959.
Only 30 years after his death, after the collapse of the Communist system, his writings were first published in Russia. Since then the Russian-language edition of The Rose of the World sold more than 800,000 copies. And it took four long years to bring the book to the English-language audience.