Petr Demyanovich Uspensky (1878, 1947)

There are people who spend their whole lives searching for a door to another dimension - and they find it. Petr Uspensky was such a person.

Born in Moscow, he became fascinated with mathematics and philosophy at an early age, but an academic career did not attract him. In 1907, his first book - "The Fourth Dimension" - was published, an attempt to understand space beyond three coordinates. Then came "Tertium Organum" (1912) - a treatise on new logic and higher forms of consciousness, which brought him European fame.

In 1915, a meeting in Moscow changed everything. Uspensky encountered George Gurdjieff - a Greco-Armenian mystic who claimed that man lives in a state of mechanical sleep and can awaken. For several years, Uspensky was his closest student, recording conversations and exercises of the system. But then - a break. The reasons remained unspoken.

He did not accept the revolution. Through Constantinople and London, he settled in England, where he lectured on Gurdjieff's "system" - already independently from his teacher. A circle of devoted students formed around him.
The main book - "In Search of the Miraculous" - was published posthumously in 1949. It is a chronicle of encounters with Gurdjieff, written with rare intellectual honesty: admiration and doubt at the same time.

Uspensky died in 1947 in Surrey, never completing his system. It is said that in his last months he urged his students to "start all over again" - almost like the hero of his novel Ivan Osokin, doomed to eternal repetition.