Meetings with Remarkable Men

The second volume of G. I. Gurdjieff’s three-part All and Everything — an autobiographical-mode narrative of his early travels through the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East in search of an esoteric brotherhood holding answers about the meaning of life. Gurdjieff began the Russian manuscript in 1927 and revised it for years; the English translation was published posthumously in 1963. The "remarkable men" — his father, the priest Bogachevsky, Captain Pogossian, Abram Yelov, Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, Ekim Bey, Piotr Karpenko, Professor Skridlov, and the engineer Soloviev — are now broadly read as composite figures rather than historical persons.

The book closes with a public lecture, "The Material Question", on how Gurdjieff financed his work. It is the most accessible of Gurdjieff’s own writings and the most readable doorway into the Fourth Way; the 1979 Peter Brook film adaptation, made with deep involvement from Jeanne de Salzmann, brought it to a much wider audience and is itself studied inside the lineage.

Contents

Reception

Treated within the Fourth Way community as one of the three primary texts (alongside Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous) and the most accessible of Gurdjieff’s own writings. The 1979 Peter Brook film adaptation, made with deep involvement from Jeanne de Salzmann, brought the book to a wider audience and is itself studied inside the lineage. Outside the Fourth Way, academic study of Gurdjieff (Joseph Azize, Carole M. Cusack) has clarified that the book is autobiographical fiction in the strict sense — its truth is teaching truth, not biographical fact.

Frequently asked

What is Meetings with Remarkable Men about?

It is the second volume of G. I. Gurdjieff’s All and Everything trilogy — an autobiographical narrative of his early travels through the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East in search of an esoteric brotherhood. The "remarkable men" are figures who accompanied or aided that search: his father, Bogachevsky, Captain Pogossian, Abram Yelov, Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, Ekim Bey, Piotr Karpenko and Professor Skridlov.

Were the remarkable men real people?

Largely no, in any strict historical sense. Modern academic study of Gurdjieff (Joseph Azize, Carole M. Cusack) treats the figures as composites — designed to communicate the search for the Sarmoung Brotherhood and the principles of the Fourth Way, not to record biography. Gurdjieff’s aim was teaching truth, not historical fact.

How is the book related to the 1979 Peter Brook film?

Brook’s adaptation, made with deep involvement from Jeanne de Salzmann (Gurdjieff’s closest pupil and successor as director of the Gurdjieff Foundation), brought the book to a much wider audience. The film is itself studied within Fourth Way groups and is widely considered the most successful screen treatment of Gurdjieff’s teaching.