The legendary "Red Book", or Liber Novus ("New Book") by Carl Gustav Jung, which first saw the light of day only in our century, is one of the most important documents of the intellectual and spiritual culture of the twentieth century. Over the course of 16 years, Jung wrote down in it those events of his inner life through which the unconscious nature of the human psyche and culture was revealed to him: his dreams, visions evoked by the method of "active imagination", as well as the experience of understanding them, in which the place of "interpretation" is taken by experience, "interpretation" is abolished for the sake of spiritual testimony, and "research" is carried out through the contemplation of images and poetic myth-making. The text, which is the origin of everything that later acquired an academic form and is still widely known as depth psychology and Jungian cultural studies, presents to the reader a true picture of the path taken by Jung in the "secret of secrets" of his own soul, and the true face of Jung the thinker - a modern psychologist and timeless mystagogue, an outstanding scientist and a visionary who surpassed science, an attentive researcher and a penetrating poet of the soul. One of the main tasks of the new translation of the "Red Book", made for the first time from the German original, is to give an idea of ​​how the manuscript looks and reads, written in Gothic font in the manner of a medieval manuscript, and how Jung's prophetic speech sounds, using with truly poetic scope the resources of the German language, whose grammar, syntax and style to this day retain deeply archaic features, providing an expressiveness inaccessible to many modern languages. At the same time, all translation decisions are based on the desire for the greatest possible accuracy in reproducing Jung's inner experience using Russian language tools.

The publication is accompanied by an article and comments by Sonu Shamdasani, the translation of which is published in a new scientific edition.

The publication was prepared with the support of the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow University "Preservation of World Cultural and Historical Heritage".