Meetings with Remarkable Men

The second decisive figure is Dean Borsh, a priest and the boy's tutor, a man of severe intelligence who took the young Gurdjieff's education far more seriously than any school would have. Where the father shaped character, Borsh aimed at the mind — and specifically at the kind of mind that refuses to be satisfied with received answers. He treated the boy not as a vessel to be filled but as someone who had to be provoked into genuine inquiry, and he was demanding to the point of harshness about it.

What Borsh planted was a question rather than a doctrine. He and the boy became preoccupied with phenomena the science of the day dismissed or couldn't explain — instances of what looked like foreknowledge, healing, powers that didn't fit the tidy materialist picture their era was so proud of. Instead of telling the boy what to conclude, Borsh insisted that these things pointed to some knowledge that had once been whole and was now scattered, surviving only in fragments held by people who had preserved it away from the modern world. The task was to go and find them.

The middle of the book unfolds as a series of companions met on the road, each a variation on the same theme. There is Abram Yelov, an Assyrian bookseller with an astonishing memory and a knack for languages, who lived by his wits and thought about words the way a jeweler thinks about stones. There is Ekim Bey, a Turkish friend who abandoned a conventional career to investigate the same hidden phenomena. There is Piotr Karpenko, and above all Pogossian, a friend so committed to work as a discipline that he kept his hands busy at all hours simply to refuse idleness.

Pogossian's principle is one of the book's sharpest ideas. He worked deliberately, even at pointless tasks, because he had decided that a person is made by effort and unmade by drift. Physical labor was not a means to money but a way of forging will against the natural pull toward comfort. These were not holy men in robes. They were tradesmen, engineers, adventurers — people who happened to have organized themselves around an inner aim while the world around them organized itself around ease and appearances.

Step back from the portraits and the argument comes into focus. Every remarkable man in the book is remarkable by an inner measure — will, honesty, a conscience that overrides comfort — and almost none of them scores well on the external measures a society uses: wealth, rank, reputation, respectability. Gurdjieff is doing something deliberate here. He is separating two ways of judging a person that most of us keep fused, and insisting they can point in opposite directions. The neighbors called his father a broken man; Gurdjieff calls him the first of the remarkable.

The father's early instruction states the principle bluntly: learn not what the people around you consider good or bad, but to act as your conscience bids. What the book adds to that sentence is the demonstration that conscience isn't a feeling you're born with and can trust automatically. In these lives it is something built — through ordeal, through work, through the refusal to drift — the way Pogossian built will with his hands or Vitvitskaia built understanding out of ruin. Convention is inherited; conscience has to be earned.

The book ends where a life like Gurdjieff's had to end — with the search itself, the sense that the fragments were real and that finding them cost everything the searcher had. He never delivers a tidy doctrine at the close, and that restraint is faithful to the whole. The remarkable men are left as portraits, not as lessons to be underlined, because their point was never a maxim you could quote. It was a way of standing in the world, carried by people who mostly went unnoticed while they stood there.