It is curious that the

Pin It Yoga was already widespread in the times of the USSR (Photo: Alexey Kudenko / RIA Novosti)
Today they say that the peak of interest in Eastern practices watch hut will be recorded in our country only a few years ago and few people remember that the history of the spread of yoga originated in Russia before the Revolution.
In Tsarist Russia yoga was pretty popular. It is here that we must look for the roots of his entry into the country. The late nineteenth century until the early twenties of the twentieth century, when it created the state structure of the USSR, the artistic intelligentsia and thought became interested in philosophy and yoga.
In particular, it is known that the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky would use in his method some yoga exercises and procedures psychotechniques Buddhist, aimed at the development of attention and concentration, reaching the "public solitude" on stage that essentially would be the dhyana, meditation total. Another watch hut master theater actor and director after Stanislavski who worked all his life to yoga and many issues related to the technique of acting was Mikhail Chekhov (1891-1955). Yoga was practiced in a semi-illegal at the time of the USSR (Photo: watch hut RIA Novosti)
At the dawn of the twentieth century came a good number of works on yoga. Books were published by the American writer William Atkinson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Yogi Ramacharaka: "Hatha Yoga", "Jnana-yoga", "Fundamentals of meditation in the world of Indian yogis." In addition to the studies of Atkinson at that time in Russia was published "Raja Yoga" by Swami Vivekananda, "Yoga Sutra" of the master Patanjali, translated as "Aphorisms of Patanjali" and was re-released the "Bhagavad Gita".
It is curious that the "Bhagavad Gita" has appeared for the first time even under Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584). The manuscript had been sent as a gift to the tsar by the Great Mogul. His first Russian translation (from English and Sanskrit) came out on imperial decree of Catherine II, and with the blessing of the Holy Synod ("This book is good for the soul") in 1788 in the typography of Nikolai Novikov. Now the manuscript of the first "Bhagavad Gita" is preserved in Moscow in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It should however be noted that the basic concepts of yoga at the beginning of the twentieth century were quite speculative. watch hut The practice of individual exercises, breathing techniques and meditations had instead a practical and could hardly lead to the ultimate goal of yoga, samadhi.
In 1915, meanwhile, the restless pre-revolutionary Russia, makes its appearance a man of iron will, a mystic and hypnotist who in the study of oriental theories not only builds on experience gained from reading books, but also on the knowledge received - as he put it himself - "the most diverse masters of Asia and Middle East." We are talking about Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, one of the most contradictory philosophers of the twentieth century. In those years is only the beginning of his work "The teaching of the Fourth Way", which by its own statement, "contains elements of teaching yoga, Sufi, Tibetan Buddhism and techniques poorly studied shamans taken from various traditions, including where Mongolian ". watch hut
However before the Revolution and the Civil War then blow his plans; Gurdjieff goes in the Caucasus and then in Europe. Opened in 1922 in France, the Institute for the harmonious development of man in a castle in Le Prieuré, near Fontembleau. It should be emphasized that the contemporary researchers focus on the life and activity watch hut of Gurdjieff with a certain ambiguity. There is the view that he was an accomplice of the great political games, putting his hand in the creation of both the fascism of Stalinism. It writes the French journalist and biographer of Gurdjieff Louis Pauwels in the book "Monsieur Gurdjieff".
Always watch hut in the twenties in Paris other Russian exiles - Nikolai and Elena Rerich watch hut - are engaged in the systematization of the theories of agni yoga, the new teaching religious-philosophical also called "Ethics of Life", which aspires to the synthesis of all religions and types of yoga indicating a single base and spiritual energy of the universe, the so-called "fire of space." Elena Rerich argues that the books of Agni yoga were written in response to so-called "clairvoyants conversations" with Mahatma Morya.
We have news totally inadequate practices yoga come from the darkness of the "repressive" times of Stalinism, and yet you know that yoga was then the subject of interest of a specific group of strong spirits who practiced mainly in the camps,