Gurdjieff International Review

Autobiographical Fragment

by P. D. Ouspensky

I was born in Moscow in 1878. My first memories are connected with my maternal grandmother’s house on Pimenovskaia Street. My grandfather died in 1882. He was a painter, chiefly a portrait painter, and in his young days a good pastelist. Later he became a church painter, which means that he had a studio and undertook contracts to paint pictures in churches or for churches. Church painting was a special industry and church painters almost a special caste.

My grandmother was a very clever woman. I never forgot the wonderful stories of old Moscow life which she told me and my sister. My mother was also a painter and she had a very good taste in Russian and French literature.

My father, at the time I was born, was a survey officer. He was very fond of music and painting and was a good mathematician. He had a particular interest in the problems of the fourth dimension to which he gave much of his spare time. All his writings were lost. He also died when I was quite young.

The house on Pimenovskaia Street had several unusual features. It was in many ways a very old-fashioned house and, in other ways very much ahead of its time. And in both cases it was my grandmother’s influence. The family did not belong to any particular class and was in touch with all classes. I think this was possible only in Russia.

I remember myself at a very early age. I have several quite clear mental pictures of events which happened before I was two years old. From the age of three I remember myself quite clearly. I remember the Moscow River about thirty miles west of Moscow. I remember the river there, boats with a smell of tar, hills covered with forests, the old monastery, etc. I remember the exhibition of 1882 in Moscow and the coronation of Alexander III in 1883, chiefly the illuminations.

About that time I began to read. When I was about six I read two books which produced an enormous impression on me. They were Lermontoff’s A Hero of Our Time and Turgenieff’s A Sportsman’s Sketches. Soon after that I became very interested in poetry and painting, I mean reading poetry and looking at pictures. Poetry and painting became the arts for me. I was also very fond of all kinds of engravings and prints of which there was a large collection in the house; I could also sketch at that time. About eight I began to feel a great interest in natural science; everything about plants and animals had an enormous fascination for me at that time.

Work at school was dull; I was lazy; I hated Greek and school routine in general. Happily the boys at school were left very much to themselves, and although I lived in school I managed to read a great deal. About thirteen I became interested in dreams and consequently in psychology. At sixteen I first found Nietzsche. In 1896, when I was eighteen, I began my first independent travels, and at the same time I began to write. I was very anarchistically inclined at that time. I particularly distrusted all forms of academic science and took a firm decision never to pass any examinations and never to take any degrees. At the same time I worked very intensely on biology, mathematics and psychology. I was enormously excited by the idea of the fourth dimension and subsequently, terribly disappointed by the usual ‘scientific’ treatment of it.

I mistrusted and disliked all kinds of socialism even more than industrialism and militarism, and did not believe in any kind of secret revolutionary parties, with which all Russian ‘intelligentsia’ sympathized. But when I became interested in journalism I could only work on ‘left’ papers because ‘right’ papers did not have what was for me, an acceptable ‘smell.’ It was one of the complexities of Russian life.

I became dissatisfied with science. I felt that there was a dead wall everywhere, even in mathematics, and I used to say at that time that professors were killing science in the same way as priests were killing religion. For several years I was in journalistic work; I travelled—in Russia, in the East, in Europe. In 1905, during the months of strikes and disorders which ended in the armed insurrection in Moscow, I wrote a novel based on the idea of eternal recurrence. It was published only ten years later.

In 1907 I found theosophical literature, which was prohibited in Russia—Blavatsky, Olcott, Annie Besant, Sinnett, etc. It produced a very strong impression on me although I at once saw its weak side. The weak side was that, such as it was, it had no continuation. But it opened doors for me into a new and bigger world. I discovered the idea of esotericism, found a possible angle for the study of religion and mysticism, and received a new impulse for the study of ‘higher dimensions.’ In 1908 I was in Constantinople, Smyrna, Greece and Egypt. Early in 1909 I finally left Moscow and after that lived in St. Petersburg. I studied occult literature; made all kinds of psychological experiments by the Yogi and magical methods: published several books, Tertium Organum among them, and gave public lectures on the Tarot, on Superman, on Yogis, etc.

In 1913 and 1914 I was in Egypt, Ceylon and India, and returned to Russia soon after the beginning of the war. In the beginning of 1915 I gave, first in St. Petersburg and later in Moscow, several public lectures on my travels and on my search for the miraculous. In the spring of 1915 I met in Moscow a strange man who had a kind of philosophical school. This was G. I. Gurdjieff. He and his ideas produced a very great impression on me. Very soon I realized that he had found many things for which I had been looking in India. I realized that I had met with a completely new system of thought surpassing all I knew before. This system threw quite a new light on psychology and explained what I could not understand before in esoteric ideas and ‘school principles.’ I spent a week with G. in Moscow and returned to St. Petersburg with very great expectations. In the autumn of 1915 G. came to St. Petersburg and after that began to come regularly, giving lectures to small groups which I arranged for him.

At the end of 1916 I found myself in the Guards Sappers. It was a strange but not unpleasant experience. Four months afterwards I was given my discharge on account of bad sight. This was two weeks before the revolution. I had no illusions about the revolution and I realized that the days of Russia were numbered. I decided to go abroad, wait for the end of the war in one of the neutral countries, and afterwards continue my work in London where, on my way back from India, I had made some preparations for publishing my books.

My departure from Russia was delayed because of my connection with G. He went to the Caucasus just before the revolution, and for some time I had no news of him. I heard from him only in June, and immediately went to his native place in Transcaucasia. Next month G. invited members of the Moscow and Petersburg groups to the Caucasus. We spent the end of the summer of 1917 at Essentuki, a place with mineral waters in North Caucasus, and in September we came to Touapse, on the Black Sea. I went to St. Petersburg for the last time in the autumn of 1917 and I left it a week before the overthrow of the provisional government by the bolsheviks. I came back to the Caucasus and after that stayed there a little more than two years, first on the Black Sea shore and later, again at Essentuki.

During the first year I was with G., but in the summer of 1918 I began to feel that I had ceased to understand him, or his views had changed, and I found it necessary to separate G. and the system, of which I had no doubts. But it did not help very much, so in the end I broke with G. and soon afterwards he left Essentuki and went to Tiflis. I spent a very difficult winter in Essentuki. It was in the hands of the bolsheviks at that time, and there was civil war round about us. In January 1919 we were liberated by the whites. But it was clear that it was only a temporary liberation. If I wanted to continue my work it was necessary to go abroad, according to my original plan.

I passed the summer and autumn of 1919 between Ekaterinodar, Rostov and Novorossisk, and in January 1920 I left Russia for Constantinople and stayed there about a year and a half. Constantinople then was full of Russians. I began lectures there on psychology, on my travels, etc., and in the summer of 1920 I met G. who had come there from Tiflis. I tried to work with him again but soon found it impossible for the same reasons as before.

In August 1921 I left Constantinople for London. I started my lectures in London and met many people interested in the same kind of ideas. In February 1922 G. visited London; he then lived in Germany. I was still very interested in his work, but this time I very firmly decided to stand apart. G. went to France. I helped him in many ways to organize his work there, and in 1922 and in 1923 went many times to Paris and to Fontainebleau. At the end of 1923 I found that I could not remain connected with G. because I ceased to understand him completely, and I broke with him finally in January 1924.

After that I continued my work in London. In 1931 I published A New Model of the Universe in English. It was a very long work. The correction of the translation took about two years. After 1931 my work was chiefly connected with the development of a psychological system based on the study of ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘objective consciousness.’ These terms need explanations. I am preparing a book on this system and it may be published in a year or two.

London 1935