In Search of P. D. Ouspensky by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2006-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE BREAK

OUSPENSKY KNEW HE had to go abroad, but he didn’t want to leave before Gurdjieff. That would be like abandoning ship. He wanted to make sure he had done everything he could to help Gurdjieff before he took care of his own affairs. His solicitousness cost him dearly. When Gurdjieff and his troupe headed for the mountains, Ouspensky stayed behind; by then it was too late. The history of crime was upon him. He was trapped. Cossacks had attacked the railway line, and the Bolsheviks had begun their “requisitions”—basically, looting. Ouspensky was forced to remain in Essentuki for another year. He felt foolish: he had had the chance to get away and missed it, something the sly man would never have done. It was a difficult time, but Ouspensky was philosophical: only two in his family contracted typhoid; miraculously, no one died. They weren’t robbed. Although it was a time of famine and want, Ouspensky was able to find work, first as a porter, then a schoolteacher. At one point he convinced the local Soviet to let him set up the Essentuki Soviet Public Library with books that had been “requisitioned” from their owners, no doubt remembering the loss of his own collection. Ouspensky showed his own brand of panache and resourcefulness when the White Army “liberated” Essentuki and he hastily tore down the word “Soviet” from the library’s sign.

What he heard of Gurdjieff was minimal and intermittent. Gurdjieff had, it seemed, made his way by rail to Maikop, then reached Sochi by foot, subjecting his group to another series of super efforts. Ouspensky may have felt some satisfaction when he discovered that in Sochi practically all of the Essentuki group decided they had had enough. Only four remained with Gurdjieff and his wife: the Stoernevals and the de Hartmanns. Zakharov, Petrov, and the rest had jumped ship, just as Ouspensky had foreseen. Gurdjieff and his reduced band had made their way to Tiflis. Here, through the de Hartmanns, he would meet the artist Alexandre de Salzmann (like de Hartmann, a friend of the Theosophist Wassily Kandinsky), and the work would take on another character. In Tiflis, Gurdjieff would make his first attempt to establish the entity with which he would finally make a name for himself: The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Ouspensky, meanwhile, passed from the frying pan into the fire. It wasn’t until June 1919 that he managed to escape from Essentuki. Still trying to get abroad, like Gurdjieff, he found himself moving from place to place—Rostov, Ekaterinodar, Novorossiysk. At Rostov he was delighted to discover his old journalist friend Bechhofer-Roberts, with whom, we know, he had once shared some homemade vodka. Roberts found Ouspensky living in miserable conditions, in a drafty, ice-cold apartment with no coal and little food, body and soul kept together by his minimal belongings: a worn overcoat, a few shirts, a pair of boots, some socks, a blanket, a towel, a razor, a file, and a whetstone. Given the situation, Ouspensky thought he was extraordinarily lucky to have even these.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.