SOURCE: “Siddhartha,” in Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art, Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 121–57.

In the following essay, Boulby describes Hesse's familiarity with the East, apparent in Siddhartha and many of the author's writings.

Hesse's journey to the East began in his childhood. His parents' personal experience of Southeast Asia, the indological expertise of grandfather Hermann Gundert with his specimens, books, and mastery of several oriental languages, the Asian visitors who came frequently to the house at Calw—the sources were early and varigated. This was, in any case, the age of the “Oriental Renaissance” in Europe. That movement which began in Germany with the Schlegels and with Schopenhauer had turned into a fashionable cult by the mid-nineteenth century, and in the time of Hesse's own childhood was if anything accelerated and intensified by the reaction against the pseudoscientific banalities of the Naturalist school.

Hesse's conscious, intellectual interest in...