George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, the son of a Pontic Greek and an Armenian. The exact date of his birth is unknown (anything ranging from 1866 to 1877 has been offered). He grew up in Kars and traveled to many parts of the world before returning to Moscow on New Year's Day in 1912 and immediately began attracting spiritual followers. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe. In 1912 he married Julia Ostrowska. In 1914 he produced a ballet called "The Struggle of the Magicians", and by 1915 he was teaching his mysticism to around thirty pupils. He returned to his family home in Alexandropol in 1917. During the Bolshevik Revolution he set up temporary study communities in Essentuki in the Caucasus, then Tuapse, Maikop, Sochi and Poti, all on the Black Sea coast of Southern Russia, where he worked intensively with his Russian pupils. In 1918, as civil war threatened Essentuki, he traveled to Maikop posing as a scientist on a scientific expedition. In 1919 he gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances. He and his pupils moved to Tbilisi and established the first Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. In 1920, he and his students walked by foot to the Black Sea coast, and then Istanbul. In August 1921 and 1922, he travelled around western Europe lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work. He established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon. In 1924, he had a near-fatal car accident, and was nursed back to health by his wife and mother. He formally "disbanded" his Institute and began writing All and Everything. In 1926 his wife died of cancer. In 1929 he started visiting North America . In 1935 he stopped writing All and Everything, having completed the first two parts of the trilogy and only having started on the Third Series. He returned to Paris and taught there throughout World War II. He died in 1949 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.