Michel de Salzmann

Michel de Salzmann, psychiatrist: born Paris 31 December 1923; married (one son, one daughter); died Paris 4 August 2001.

There is something mysterious about people who devote their own lives to the life of someone else, whether they are biographers, social workers or religious disciples. Thus the name of Michel de Salzmann is inseparable from that of the spiritual master he served, a name still resonant with mystery and potent with myth, that of G.I. Gurdjieff.

Salzmann was head of the world-wide Gurdjieff movement, called Institut Gurdjieff in France, where Salzmann lived and the organisation was based. Salzmann worked professionally as a psychiatrist but his life was taken up with Gurdjieff seminars, informal groups and a network of publications.

As leader of the Institut Gurdjieff much of his time was occupied with tedious bureaucratic and institutional obligations. This somewhat ludicrous aspect of his responsibilities, as official guardian of a long-dead guru's rules, should not detract from his true understanding of Gurdjieff:

He was a danger. A real threat. A threat for one's self-calming, a threat for the little regard one had of oneself, a threat for the comfortable repertoire where we generally live. But at the moment when this threat appeared, like a ditch to cross, a threshold to step over, one was helped to cross it by his presence itself.

The threat of Gurdjieff had been with Salzmann ever since he was born, part of an extraordinary family history. For Michel de Salzmann was heir to a dynasty of spiritual seekers, his own parents central to Gurdjieff's career. His father, Alexandre de Salzmann, was a painter and theatre designer, friend of Kandinsky and Rilke and member of the Jugendstil group. As a celebrated metteur en scène in Russia and France, he had revolutionised lighting techniques with his production of Pelléas et Mélisande.

It was in St Petersburg in 1919 that Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne first met Gurdjieff. They were both immediately enthralled and spent the rest of their lives disseminating his teachings, especially in the Francophone world. It was at the famous Gurdjieff group led by the Salzmanns from the rue Brancas in Sèvres that Alexandre introduced Gurdjieff to the writer René Daumal and so transformed the latter's work.

In 1922 Jeanne de Salzmann joined Gurdjieff at his Institute for Harmonious Development of Man, outside Paris at Fontainebleau-Avon. As his closest disciple Jeanne was particularly involved with Gurdjieff's sacred dances and she brought these "movements" to the Peter Brook film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979). As Brook recalls in his memoir Threads of Time (1998):

At Gurdjieff's death [in 1949] Madame de Salzmann found herself virtually alone, inheriting the gigantic and volcanic output that Gurdjieff had left behind. All over the world there were groups of students left rudderless . . .

Madame de Salzmann began the Institut Gurdjieff and its international branches such as the influential Gurdjieff Foundation she created in the United States in 1953. She later moved to Geneva and remained actively involved in all aspects of the commemoration of Gurdjieff, including a television documentary on Katherine Mansfield's final few months at La Prieuré.

Jeanne de Salzmann died in 1990, aged 101, and despite her three decades with Gurdjieff the final proof of her deep understanding of his philosophy was that she never published a memoir. This was an act of exceptional forbearance considering that anyone who took a glass of Armagnac with Gurdjieff later wrote intimate books on him.

Likewise her son Michel, who had known Gurdjieff all his childhood, published relatively little on him. He did contribute this portrait of Gurdjieff to The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987):

Resembling more the figure of a Zen patriarch or a Socrates than the familiar image of a Christian mystic, Gurdjieff was considered by those who knew him simply as an incomparable "awakener" of men. He brought to the West a comprehensive model of esoteric knowledge and left behind him a school embodying a specific methodology for the development of consciousness.

Salzmann also appeared in a documentary film about Gurdjieff in 1976 and wrote an introductory essay for J. Walter Driscoll's Gurdjieff: an annotated bibliography (1985).

But it was as one of the last living links to Gurdjieff himself that Michel de Salzmann was so important. As Jacob Needleman wrote,

Now we have a very dramatic moment . . . the third generation, older pupils who didn't know Gurdjieff directly. This is the turning point. Time will tell whether we can continue to gather and be a channel for the forces that Gurdjieff set in motion.

Adrian Dannatt