When in 1989 I first contemplated this project, I was surprised to discover that there existed neither a scholarly biography of Pavlov nor an even remotely satisfactory account of his Nobel Prize–winning research on digestion or his famous studies of conditional reflexes.
Over the next few years, I came to understand the reasons. For one thing, he was a Soviet icon—so Russian scholars needed to toe a tight line, and foreign historians could gain only limited access to archival materials. For another, his research on digestion and the higher nervous system seemed pretty complicated stuff. The latter was for me initially almost impenetrable, not so much because it was in Russian as because it employed an unfamiliar, intimidating, and disappointingly dry technical jargon. And Pavlov’s publications, I soon realized, were but the tip of an iceberg—they reflected his synthesis of experimental studies by an army of coworkers, so an understanding of his scientific path would require a historian to collect and analyze these as well.
And that was just the science. Pavlov’s long active life (1849–1936) stretched from the reign of Tsar Nicholas I to the first decade of Stalin’s rule, from the emancipation of Russia’s serfs to crash industrialization and mass arrests, from Turgenev’s Fathers and Children to Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, and from the birth of Russia’s scientific community to the massive expansion and Stalinization of science. He lived through the assassination of one tsar and the execution of another, four lost wars, and three revolutions. And he prospered in each context.
The more I read, the more I realized that, if the necessary archival materials were available, a real “life, times, and work” biography of Pavlov would involve issues and events that most fascinated me as a Russianist and historian of science and medicine. That prospect was all the more alluring because existing scholarship answered none of the most interesting questions about him. As for Pavlov himself, I had little sense of him as a man and no attraction to the flinty icon. Historians (like scientists), however, are often guided by intuition and rewarded or punished by chance and circumstance.
Fate smiled on me. Through the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, and the International Research and Exchanges Board, I arrived in Leningrad in September 1990 for one full year as Gorbachev’s glasnost was opening up the archives and encouraging cooperation with the West. Russian scholars had begun to locate and publish Pavlov’s impassioned letters to Soviet leaders criticizing the terror and suppression of religion, and quite a few of them—along with the directors of important archives—greeted me with open arms and greatly facilitated my research. Continuing grant support permitted me to travel back and forth throughout the 1990s and early 2000s as one Russian archive after another opened up, as my research and growing circle of Russian contacts alerted me to new sources, and as my sense of the story developed.
I was often too excited to sleep as the rich materials I encountered brought to life a Pavlov very different from the icon I knew, and revealed a life story that seemed truly epic. The documents ranged from the records of his student years at seminary to the transcripts of the Communist Party cells in his labs, and from his scientific manuscripts and notebooks to his political speeches; they included revealing love letters to his future wife and correspondence with hundreds of laypeople, scholars, artists, and Communist Party leaders, and unpublished memoirs by his wife, his lover, and numerous coworkers. In the Communist Party archive, I stumbled across a set of secret police surveillance reports (they remained there only because they had been misfiled in 1934). I studied Pavlov’s art collection and library, and climbed onto the dog stand in an isolated chamber of his Towers of Silence as a Russian physiologist closed the heavy door and encouraged me to imagine how an animal must have felt in that situation. I interviewed surviving coworkers and acquaintances, and was privileged to come to know his granddaughters, Liudmila Vladimirovna Balmasova and Maria Vladimirovna Sokolova, and his great-granddaughter, Marina Anatol’evna Balmasova, each of whom graciously supported and facilitated my research.
This story, I decided, was worthy of a broad audience, so I have attempted to write a scholarly biography accessible to the educated layperson, to bring to life and weave together Pavlov’s personality, life, times, and science. As science was so central to his existence—and as his famous research on conditional reflexes has been so widely misunderstood—I examine it closely and explore a central theme of interest to historians of science and medicine: how did his context, values, beliefs, and personality influence his design and interpretation of experiments, and his scientific views in general? These “human factors” suffused the science of this iconic objectivist, shaping it at the very deepest level. Both God and the Devil dwell in the details, so this part of the Pavlov story requires us sometimes to engage his data charts, salivary curves, and often arcane reasoning. I have tried to do so in a manner accessible and illuminating to nonspecialists, scientists, and scholars in history of science and medicine. To facilitate reading of the sections on conditional reflexes—and to help with Pavlov’s keywords and some other necessary terms—I have appended a glossary.
Although the archival material about Pavlov is comparatively rich, every biographer realizes that we are always left with only fragments of a life. Relatively little of a person’s experiences, thoughts, and emotions is preserved in manuscripts, memoirs, and photos. Emotion, motivation, and reasoning must almost always be inferred, and even the most honest and perceptive memoir is fallible and selective. (And in Pavlov’s case, there are too few memoirs by those who disliked him.) Pavlov wrote many letters, but they tended to be telegraphic, businesslike—one senses that he didn’t enjoy writing them. I often found myself longing for at least one conversation with him and wondering how he might respond to my own perspectives (especially on his scientific work). He need not agree, I told myself, but I should be able to hold my own. Yet, as we all know from daily experience, even the lengthiest and most candid conversation—indeed, even constant interaction—also yields only partial and tendentious knowledge, impressions of another person. We are left always with fragments and interpretation. And I have been comforted by the advantage of having watched Pavlov develop over time—by the historian’s belief that people show themselves by their development; by the opportunity to read countless memoirs along with his manuscripts and mail (including works he chose not to publish and letters he chose not to send); and by the consistent patterns and tensions I have discerned.
Yet I know that another scholar might well study the very same materials, ponder them over two decades with equal seriousness, differ markedly from my own perceptions, emphases, choices, and interpretations—and so portray him in quite a different light. In that sense, what follows is certainly my Pavlov.