Demian. Klingsor's last summer. Holiday maker. Narcissus and Chrysostom

Hermann Hesse is known as a brilliant storyteller, a true intellectual and an observant psychologist, whose unusual plots of his novels amaze from the first pages. The collection opens with the writer’s iconic work, which had a huge influence on all his subsequent work, “Demian,” which the great Thomas Mann compared with “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” This is the story of the growing up and formation of a young man who, step by step, moves further and further away from the hypocritical norms of public morality and more and more clearly discovers his deep, dark “I” - free, not subject to the virtuous pharisaism reigning around him. In this he is helped by his mysterious friend Demian - the bearer of the “seal of Cain”, either the devil, or a mysterious deity, or simply a product of the hero’s imagination... The stories “The Soul of a Child”, “Klein and Wagner”, “Klingsor’s Last Summer” were published for the first time a single collection during the writer’s lifetime and have been invariably published together since then. The secret of the unobvious internal connection between them is actually simple: the heroes of all three of Hesse’s stories are people experiencing a radical breakdown and revaluation of their own value system. “Narcissus and Chrysostom” is a philosophical story that is considered key to Hesse’s creative development. Stylized as an adventurous novel of the late Middle Ages, the story of two brilliant novice friends from a secluded German monastery, pursuing spiritual enlightenment and perfection in art in different ways... The collection also includes the famous autobiographical essays “Wandering,” “Resort Visitor,” and “Trip to Nuremberg.”