George Gurdjieff

He married Julia Ostrowska in Saint Petersburg, in 1912.

He fathered seven children with seven different women. These women were Jessmin Howarth, Lily Galumnian Chaverdian, Georgii, Edith Annesley Taylor, Elizaveta Grigorievna, Jeanne Allemand de Salzmann and Olga Ivanovna Hinzenberg.

He was often criticized for his unrealistic and unsuccessful treatments on people, which led to the deaths of many individuals, including his wife, who died after suffering from cancer and after being treated with unsuccessful medical practices by Gurdjieff.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in the 19th century to a Greek father and an Armenian mother in Alexandropol (now Gyumri, Armenia), a part of the Russian Empire.

He was raised in Kars—a city where Turkish, Russian and Armenian cultures entwined. He was greatly influenced by the Russian language and scientific literature but he realized that none of the two could explain the inexplicable singularities he would often experience.

This led him to believe that a deeper truth lay beyond science and religion. It was this belief that led him to travel around the world for a few years, before he returned to Russia in 1912.

He supported himself during his travels by working a number of odd jobs such as dying hedgerow birds yellow and selling them as canaries. In 1912, he arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students, talking about the purpose of human life and his theories on ‘waking sleep’

Two years later, since he was an avid musician, he publicized his ballet, ‘The Struggle of the Magicians’, which he also believed, was a route to spirituality.

During the Russian Revolution in Russia, he left Petrograd in 1914 and traveled to his family who lived in Alexandropol. During the Bolshevik Revolution, he set up provisional study groups in Tuapse, Pot, Sochi and Caucasus, where he worked on a number of his pupils.

In 1919, he established the first Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

From 1921 to 1922, he traveled around Western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work about man’s inner oppression and evolution, in various cities such as London and Berlin. He then decided to establish the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Paris.

Throughout his life, Gurdjieff worked on the three parts of his magnum opus, ‘All and Everything’. The first part, ‘Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson’, is an extensive, figurative work, published posthumously in 1950. This work includes two English translations, one which was carried out under his observation and the other which was published in 1991.

This is largely considered one of his greatest works because it is believed to give the best summary to Gurdjieff’s ideas, since part of the book’s intent is to arrogate the standard patterns of thought. Two of the other parts of ‘All and Everything’ titled ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’ and ‘Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’, were also equally successful, while the latter remained unfinished.