WITH GURDJIEFF IN ST PETERSBURG AND PARIS ANNA BUTKOVSKY-HEWITT with the assistance of MARY COSH AND ALICIA STREET ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL London and Henley CONTENTS Introduction Prologue: The Nights of St Petersburg The Beginning Ouspensky: I Ouspensky: II The Miracle Charkovsky The Young Man Laziness Jumping Over Your Head The Six Reels Density Voices In the Caucasus Revolution and Change Improvising Dancing Auteuil Conclusion Appendix: I Remember Rasputin INTRODUCTION A■, t the time when many of the events and meetings described in this book took place I was a little over thirty. I was bom not far from the capital of Bessarabia, a southern province of Russia noted for its good wine and fruit. My father, Ilya Niko- laevitch Butkovsky, a counsel in the Ministry of Justice, had been sent there from St Petersburg, and it was there that he met and married my mother, whose father was also in the Ministry of Justice. My paternal grandfather was one of the generals who had fought against Napoleon, and from him my father inherited a large estate in the province of Novgorod, a famous and ancient town not far from St Petersburg. The many serfs on this estate had been freed even be­ fore the Act of Liberation issued by the Tsar Alexander II in 1861.. I had one brother, Alexey Ilyitch, who was ten years older than myself, and a sister, Natalie, six and a half years older. Our mother was a highly cultivated woman, who had been educated in Dresden and spoke several languages. She was devoted to the Arts, and when I was vm INTRODUCTION only nine years old she took me and my sister with her to visit the capitals of Europe—Rome, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and other places—for a whole year. During these travels we visited all the most famous art galleries and museums where my mother by her own informed enthusiasm taught me how to appreciate what I saw. I also studied music from an early age—as I describe in this book—and when I grew up I went to the St Peters­ burg Conservatoire to study under each of its two best professors in turn. At the same time, I was attending the Faculty of History at the University for Women, under the famous Professor Rostovtzoff—the same who con­ tributed some research to Schliemann’s work on Troy. My sister Natalie waslatertomarry PrinceShervachidze, a scenic designer with the Imperial Opera and Ballet, who was to work abroad with Diaghilev. Through them I met all the leading choreographers and members of the ballet—Fokine, Diaghilev, Pavlova, Karsavina and many others. My sister also published art books and magazines. In 1908, when I was 23, I married a young Russian naval officer who was also very musical and had quite a good tenor voice. Our marriage did not prove a success £ind after some time we parted and I returned to live at my parents’ house once more. I devoted myself to my studies, especially music, but felt a great lack of mean­ ing to my life and the need to pursue some end more universal and significant thcin the daily social round. My story begins in 1916, the time when I first met Ouspensky. Russia had then been at war with Germany for two years, but the rumblings of revolution were still below the surface. Meanwhile, our beautiful capital city was still gay and full of life, cafe society was as lively as ever, the ballet flourished, and the long nights were filled with social meetings and discussions. IX PROLOGUE: THE NIGHTS OF ST PETERSBURG 1. t was summer and the warm June night, light as day (what we used to call in St Petersburg the ‘white nights’—from the title of Dostoev­ sky’s short story), was perfect as we walked along the Neva quay. The clouds, the river, the silhouettes of palaces, bridges, the famous sphinxes—everything in sight was impregnated with an element of unreality, of the fantastic, that we liked. At the granite parapet we stopped to look down at the reflections of the buildings in the water. \Ne had been talking as usual on abstract subjects, or had remained silent, and now it seemed a pity to allow to come to an end that ‘crowding of in­ describable emotions’ so withdrawn from everyday existence, and merely to go home to prosaic sleep. In such a mood there was only one place one could go, and that was to the Errant Dog. This was a kind of club for actors, musicians, writers, painters, artists of the ballet and opera—celebrated and less celebrated. It was like a theatre in miniature, or a small concert room, a centre for professional meetings and all kinds of unexpected things. One of its chief [ 2 ] PROLOGUE: THE NIGHTS OF ST PETERSBURG attractions was that here, after about eleven o ’clock at night when all the theatre performances had finished, people such as these would come; and also honorary balletomanes, Maecenases, critics, contributors to the journals Old Times, The Golden Fleece, Satyricon and the rest. If Sarah Bernhardt were still alive she, too, would surely have come here, with or without her coffin (which she always took about with her when travelling abroad—or so the rumour went!) and perhaps would herself have been tempted to read some fragment from Aiglon, or else seat herself on the divan to listen to some young poet yet unknown, or to the voices of poets already famous: Andrey Bely, Alexander Bloc, Gumilyov, his wife Anna Akhmatova, or any other of the Pleiades. She would have understood what they spoke about, for, thank God, this secret, mystic language is the common tongue of all poets. Legend had it that somewhere within the walls of the Errant Dog existed an album of the autographs of its most illustrious visitors. What a unique and precious col­ lection that must have been! Very likely in the storm of the Revolution it perished with so many other treasures. What would they not give for it in America today? But even if in times of peace it did exist, all those who wrote their signatures in it vanished in the course of time or were scattered to the four corners of the world. P. D. Ouspensky, author of books on mysticism and the fourth dimension, whose friend I was, used to enlarge on these and related subjects at the Errant Dog. When he talked, people used to flock around him listening in fascination while the time flew by. Outside, the dawn broke and then, at last, Ouspensky, with Volinsky, a well-known writer, and three or four others including [3] PROLOGUE; THE NIGHTS OF ST PETERSBURG myself, would go on to thS buffet at the Nikolaevski Station to drink an early-morning glass of tea. It would be only after prolonged wanderings of this kind that eventually we all accompanied each other home, while the group gradually shrank in numbers. Usually the last to go were Ouspensky, who lived at the comer of Nevsky Prospekt—our Piccadilly—and Liteynaia Street, and myself who lived close-by, near the corner of Nevsky and Nikolaevski Street. He would first come to my house and then cross the street to go home, but sometimes would go on to the third corner of Nevsky and Trotsky Street and into the ‘Phillipoff’, a cafe well known to everyone. It was a curious coincidence that the other important character in my story also lived very near there, at the fourth comer, Nevsky and Pushkin Street: Gurdjieff— the man of whom Evreinoff a celebrity of the Russian theatrical world, spoke of as an ‘Event’, a word which means, in the Russian language, literally ‘unique’. [4]