Elena Szenicer
The Sound
The meeting of Elena and the Teaching started with a sound… The sound of the name ‘Gurdjieff’, overheard by chance at a neighbouring table in a café in Paris. This sound then was instrumental in her meeting and the establishing of a deep friendship with Nicolai Tereshchenko. The meeting was to be the first in a series of meetings with remarkable men; those who keep and transmit the tradition, and, either openly or in a hidden form, maintain and develop this Work that is called the Fourth Way.
Meetings with Remarkable Men
Many of these men and women were and remain essence friends of Elena, among them several direct students of Gurdjieff and Mouravieff. Several have insisted regularly to Elena on the importance and inevitability for her to create and guide a group, or have sent her their own students.
Nicolai Tereshchenko, Bernard Ruaud, Colette and Maurice Leconte, Count George de Maleville, Solange Claustres, Djavad, Claude Thomas, André Bajot, Amiyo Devienne, Vladimir Stepanov and Yuri Mamleyev.
The Group
In 2007 she meets the philosopher and writer Arkady Rovner who invites her to Russia and Ukraine to give a series of lectures for his friends and students. Since then groups and individuals have organised several lectures, conferences and seminars for her, entirely dedicated to the practice of the Work and Sacred Movements. In 2010 these people living in different cities and countries, united in the Paris Group with which Elena continuer to work non-stop.
The teaching in the group takes different forms: group meetings, seminars, movements, expeditions, sacred meals, and an intensive correspondence, but the main part of the teaching happens in the context of practical everyday life.
All these forms of work correspond to the heritage that was transmitted orally and in writing to Elena by Solange Claustres, with whom she has shared the solitude of the last years as a friend and helper. It is with her blessing and guidance that the Paris Group was created.
The Book
From the first days of the creation of the group Elena keeps an intensive correspondence with dozens of her students, this correspondence contains about 2000 letters on the Gurdjieff Work, answers to the students questions commentaries.
Some students have taken the initiative to prepare extracts of this correspondence for publication in order to make these chronicles of a Work Group accessible to a larger audience. This first book will be published in 2013.
