The Journey to the East

Hesse himself said the point of the story was "the loneliness of the spiritual human being in our time and the need to classify his personal life and actions into a suprapersonal whole, an idea and a community, a longing for service, a search for community, liberation from sterile, lonely virtuosity of the artist."

"The Journey to the East" is a narrative by Hermann Hesse, first published in 1932, which describes a journey into a spiritual East. Hermann Hesse began working on "The Journey to the East" in the summer of 1930, shortly before moving within Montagnola from Casa Camuzzi to a house newly built for him by Hans Conrad Bodmer, and just before his marriage to his third wife, Ninon Dolbin. His old eye ailment had worsened, and Hesse was on the verge of blindness. After painful surgeries, he had to lie in a darkened room for weeks. He dedicated the work, completed in April 1931, to his patron Bodmer and his wife Elsy. It was pre-printed in the magazine "Corona," edited by Bodmer's son, the same year, and the first edition was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1932. Alfred Kubin designed the dust jacket, cover, and vignette on the title page.

The Journey to the East"abandons the sublime style characteristic of "The Glass Bead Game" or "Siddhartha," and is instead written in a fresh, poetically enchanting, and sometimes almost youthfully naive language. It is a fairy-tale-like poem that directly addresses the reader. The narrative is full of symbols, metaphors, and parables, which are often incomprehensible to the reader without detailed knowledge of the biographical and contemporary historical background. Hesse himself wrote in a letter to Alice Leuthold: "The symbolism itself does not necessarily have to become 'clear' to the reader; he should not understand in the sense of 'explaining,' but rather he should absorb the images and their meaning, what they contain as a parable of life, and swallow it on the side; the effect then sets in unconsciously."