If I had my life to live over again... Well, what would you do? Here is the story of Ivan Osokin, a young man who has squandered every chance life has given him. A failure at school, ruined financially, and rejected by the woman he loves, he finds himself at a dead end. He wishes to live his life over again so he can avoid all his mistakes. Then he meets a magician who gives him that chance. A gripping, cinematic story exploring 'eternal recurrence' -- the idea that we live our lives over and over again, and that nothing will ever change unless we ourselves change.

'A brilliant fantasy.' -- The Guardian 'The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin is an early work. Originally a novel but later rechristened Cinemadrama in the early days of films, Ouspensky himself set considerable store by it, perhaps because it was the only purely imaginative work by a mind that was rigorously honest in facing up to the usual abuses of human imagination.' -- Gurdjieff International Review 'A gripping, cinematic story by the great Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky. In his classic novel, set in the last years of Tsarist Russia, Ouspensky explores imaginatively one of the chief themes in his philosophical work: the idea of eternal recurrence . This is the fascinating idea, which also engaged Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that we live our lives over and over again in a kind of endlessly repeating film, and that nothing will change in this ceaseless whirligig, unless we ourselves change-deeply and fundamentally.' -- Consciousness Now (www.triadbooks.com)

P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) was one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the first in the modern era to explore questions of higher consciousness and personal transformation.