FOLLOWING HIS MEETING WITH Gurdjieff in Moscow, Ouspensky returned to St. Petersburg. He went to the Stray Dog, an underground café frequented by the city's intelligentsia. Here he met his companion of the time Anna Ilinishna Butkovsky, an aristocrat and aspiring pianist. He approached her and without pausing for a formal greeting or even stopping to sit down, declared "I have found the Miracle!" That fall Gurdjieff visited the city and a group was formed. It consisted of Ouspensky, Sophie Grigorievna, Anna Ilinishna Butkovsky, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Dr. Leonid and Elizabeta Stjoernval, Anthony Charkovsky, Andrey Zaharoff, and an unnamed senior official with the government.