Ouspensky in Constantinople

Mavi Boncuk |

In January 1920 Ouspensky arrived destitute in a Constantinople teeming with Allied forces, demobilised Turks, and Russian refugees. On completing shipboard quarantine, the family were fortunate to find accommodation in a single room in a large lodging house on Prinkipo Island in the Marmara. Ouspensky again supported them, this time by teaching mathematics to children, and English (which he scarcely knew) to fellow émigrés. Once established, Ouspensky began lectures on Gurdjieff’s ideas in Pera, Constantinople’s European quarter; here, in the upstairs offices of the Russky Mayak[1] (a Y.M.C.A. for White Russians) he excited broad interest, gradually forming a nucleus of twenty to thirty pupils. He anticipated the arrival of Gurdjieff and his company, which was rumoured in bazaar gossip, and which materialised in June 1920.

The ensuing year – the last throughout which Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had substantial contact – was characterised by Ouspensky’s complex vacillations. At outset, when he brought Gurdjieff to his lectures and magnanimously surrendered all his pupils to him, there seemed promise of full reconciliation. Indeed from July to September 1920 the two men related closely: exchanging visits, making excursions, attending dervish ceremonies, and working together on the scenario of Gurdjieff’s ballet The Struggle of the Magicians. However by October, when Gurdjieff opened his Institute in Constantinople at No.13 Yemenedji Sokak, the same psychological difficulties arose for Ouspensky as at Essentuki: accordingly he dissociated himself and withdrew for two months to Prinkipo. Here in mid-November 1920, he was gratified to receive, from Nikolai Alexandrovitch Bassaraboff in New York, a substantial royalty cheque, with the unanticipated news that Tertium Organum had been published successfully in English: this reinforced Ouspensky’s intention to settle in England or America. In December, once Gurdjieff’s Institute was established, Ouspensky resumed his own lectures at Russky Mayak, and also began group discussions at Matchka, in the flat of Mrs Winifred Alise Beaumont (then living with John Godolphin Bennett who a year later became Ouspensky’s pupil).

Despite their now independent trajectories, the relationship between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky was still fundamentally unimpaired. In spring 1921 Ouspensky accepted an invitation to give weekly lectures at Gurdjieff’s Institute. He also interested himself in Gurdjieff’s Movement classes at the Grand Rabbinate, both by volunteering young pupils and by attending Saturday night demonstrations (his interest however fell short of personal participation). SOURCE

"Like everyone, it was in my adolescence that a definite image of myself was formed. I became completely convinced that all my opinions, reactions, and aims were absolutely justified and worthy of respect. I did not imagine that other values as true and valid as my own could exist. There were certain ideas – such as patriotism, duty, and friendship – that I held sacred and which had an absolute and unalterable meaning for me. It was a real shock to discover that others had motives and points of view quite different from my own that were just as valid and perhaps even more correct. One day, shortly after my arrival in Constantinople, a confrontation with Gyorgi Ivanovitch (Gurdjieff) literally turned my inner world upside down and forced me to question the basis of all my beliefs. We were drinking tea in the shade of the trees by the Russki Mayak, the Russian pavilion. Our conversation turned to memories of the war, still very much alive in our minds. It was a hot day and Mr. Gurdjieff, passing nearby, stopped to take some refreshment. We stood up to offer him a seat. He sat down and asked us to continue our conversation as if he weren’t there, and so we returned to our talk of the war. 

Read MORE From– Gurdjieff – A Master In Life – Recollections of Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch

In January 1920, Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch, 20 years of age, was part of the Polish contingent of the Tsar’s army in retreat to Constantinople.. Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch was among the Russians who followed Gurdjieff from Istanbul to Germany, and then to France. After Gurdjieff's death in 1949, he worked closely with Jeanne de Salzmann before his own death in 1958.

[1] The Russian word for a lighthouse is mayak (маяк)