Narcissus and Goldmund

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) is an outstanding German-Swiss writer, Nobel Prize laureate (1946). He called his work “a long attempt to tell the story of his spiritual development”, “a biography of the soul”. His works are characterized by romanticism, psychologism and autobiographical nature. Hesse is one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century, his works are studied in schools in almost every European country. During Hesse’s lifetime, more than 4 million copies of his books were published. After his death, another 20 million were published in Germany and 100 million in other countries of the world.

In the novel “Narcissus and Goldmund”, the author shows the confrontation between two heroes: Narcissus, a scholar-theologian who devoted himself to serving God and science, and his student Goldmund, who is the embodiment of naivety and spontaneity. Both the intellectual Narcissus - pious, serious, full of peace, and Goldmund - a wanderer and a man of passions, capable of sin, try to unravel the mystery of existence and find the meaning of life. Only their means are different...