Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

We know almost verbatim what Gurdjieff taught in the early years between 1914 and 1918, because one of his pupils possessed such skills of understanding and memory that he was able to write down with meticulous precision everything he remembered, either from private conversations or from lectures given in St. Petersburg or Moscow. This pupil was P. D. Ouspensky and his book Fragments of an Unknown Teaching was authorised by Gurdjieff and published after Ouspensky's death in 1947. It is considered the most comprehensive overview of Gurdjieff's early teachings. The title was later changed into In Search of the Miraculous.
Gurdjieff's own books remained without acclaim from literary or scientific circles. One of the rare exceptions was the French surrealist André Breton, who considered Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson "the greatest book of this century" -an amazing statement for anybody who knows Breton's critical mind. Gurdjieff attracted several prominent pupils like Ouspensky, whose own book Tertium Organum had established him as a powerful thinker before he even met Gurdjieff, and the English scientist and philosopher J. G. Bennett, as well as the Jungian Maurice Nicoll and the literary critic A.R. Orage. Mainly as a result of the study groups initiated by many of his followers, the relatively small inner circle of pupils surrounding Gurdjieff during his lifetime gradually spread to much larger proportions.