The basis for 'The Rose of the World,' one of the most astonishing religious and philosophical books in world history, was, according to the author himself, mystical insights he experienced while imprisoned in Stalin's camps. This extraordinary work, practically defying genre definition, was long one of the most popular samizdat books, and after its official publication in 1991, it became a true bestseller among Russian lovers of esoteric literature. What is 'The Rose of the World,' with its strange epistemology and no less bizarre cosmogony, with its theory of a 'multilayered Universe' and the 'celestial zatomis' of earthly metacultures, with the mysterious super-entities that inhabit its pages, sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile to humanity? Perhaps each reader will have to discover this for themselves.