Petr Uspensky

Pyotr Demyanovich Uspensky (Moscow, 1878 - Surrey, 1947), known in English as P. D. Ouspensky, was a Russian writer and esotericist. He is remembered above all for presenting to the English-speaking world the early teachings of the Greek-Armenian teacher George Gurdjieff, a link between Russian thought of the early twentieth century and the British and American intellectual scene.

He attended a Moscow school, from which he was expelled at sixteen, and later worked at a Moscow daily. He became interested in Theosophy and in late 1913 travelled east in search of the miraculous. Forced home by the outbreak of the First World War, he met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915.

He was already an author before that meeting. His first book, The Fourth Dimension (1909), treated the fourth dimension as an extension of space. His novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin explored eternal recurrence, and Tertium Organum (1912) questioned the ultimate reality of space and time, proposing a higher logic in place of Aristotle's law of identity.

For about ten years he worked under Gurdjieff's supervision, but in 1924 he announced that he would continue on his own. After the Revolution he passed through Constantinople and settled in England, where his London lectures drew writers and journalists. He later broke with his former teacher and set up his own group. During the Second World War he emigrated to the United States, and in 1947 he returned to England, where he died that same year.

His legacy rests mainly on the book about his years with Gurdjieff, published after his death, and on the spread of the idea of the Fourth Way, built on self-observation and work on oneself.