Every Russian name contains a bit of family history. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov * was the son of Petr. Petr Dmitrievich Pavlov was the son of Dmitrii. Dmitrii Arkhipovich Pavlov was the son of Arkhip. Arkhip Makeevich Pavlov was the son of Makei. Makei Osipovich Pavlov was the son of Osip. Osip Pavlovich was the son of Pavel.
Sometime during the reign of Peter the Great, in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, this peasant Pavel became a reader and chanter in a small rural church in central Russia. From his common name came the family’s equally common surname Pavlov—literally, the offspring of Pavel. Pavel’s son Osip, Osip’s son Makei, and Makei’s son Arkhip all held the same position at the bottom of the church hierarchy. According to family lore, all were “strong, with the iron health of a bogatyr’”—a Herculean, knightly figure in Russian folklore.1
The Pavlovs were peasants with one foot planted precariously in the lower stratum of unordained clergy (sacristans) drawn from the mass of illiterate peasants to assist the priests. They maintained and guarded the church, read and sang during services, and were but slightly better educated than the illiterate parishioners. A good sacristan knew something of the catechism and did not abuse his position to extort money from the flock.2
Service as a sacristan provided some enterprising peasants with a rare means of upward mobility, an apprenticeship on the path to priesthood. In the mid–nineteenth century, however, the educational divide between the ordained and unordained clergy widened. The sacristans were left behind, condemned to remain at the bottom of the church hierarchy.3
The last Pavlov sacristan, Dmitrii Arkhipovich, was a devoted family man whose wife bore one daughter and three sons. They named the first and third sons Ivan, and the middle son, the father of our Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Petr. Aware of the growing importance of education, Dmitrii Arkhipovich took advantage of the free seminary education offered to the sons of church servants to send all three sons to the Riazan Theological Seminary.4
The two Ivans proved ill suited to the emerging standards of the priesthood, falling victim to their heavy drinking and other manifestations of what their nephew (our Ivan Pavlov) later described as their inner “disorderliness.” The elder Ivan was “a man of Herculean constitution” with a passion for the group fistfights that were popular in Russia. These massive brawls pitted street against street or village against village, and Ivan became legendary for his prowess in the battles between Riazan youth and the peasants from surrounding villages. He managed to complete the seminary and become a rural priest, but was soon defrocked for his addiction to fighting and alcohol. He died at an early age from a pulmonary affliction that the Pavlovs attributed to his rough and disorderly manner of life.5
The younger Ivan also completed the seminary and became a priest—but he, too, drank heavily and was eventually defrocked. He was not a bogatyr’ but a jokester, and his inner “disorder” manifested itself not in fighting but in a taste for bizarre pranks. He briefly enjoyed life as a priest with a family and an appreciative parish, but, as his nephew later recalled, “increasingly the chaos within him overturned everything.” Life in his parish grew unpredictable and strange. Bodies disappeared from coffins and roamed the graveyard in white robes. Church bells rang a warning in the middle of the night; villagers who rushed to the scene fearing fire discovered a calf tied to the bell rope. Ivan, it turned out, in the sympathetic words of his nephew, was a “profound comic” who mocked his family, death, and God. The villagers were less indulgent. Unmasking him during one blasphemous prank, they beat him severely and left him drunk, bruised, and soaking in a freezing puddle. Nor were his superiors amused—they demoted and finally expelled him from church service altogether. Shamed and without means, he lived for months under the fraternal yet censorious eye of his brother, leaving an enduring impression upon his nephew Ivan about the consequences of drinking and inner disorder.6
Only the stolid middle son, Petr Dmitrievich, proved able to sustain the Pavlovs’ upward mobility and establish himself fully in the priesthood. An excellent student at the Riazan Theological Seminary, he graduated in 1846 and, armed with glowing recommendations, became a teacher of Latin and Greek, first at the theological school in the medieval town of Skopin and then at its counterpart to the north in Riazan.
The provincial capital, Riazan had been founded in the eleventh century on the banks of the Oka River, about 150 miles southeast of Moscow. Sacked by the Mongols two centuries later, it was reborn by merger with Pereslavl Riazanskii, thirty miles away. Rebuilt after a devastating fire in the 1830s, Riazan was populated by about 18,000 souls and dominated by bureaucrats, military personnel, and meshchane (“townsmen,” mostly small shopkeepers, artisans, and skilled workers). A few small factories produced tallow and candles, but production centered in the many small workshops of carpenters, blacksmiths, cobblers, and dyers and weavers. Goods were traded in six squares scattered throughout town. Central streets were paved with cobblestone or wood; the others were dirt paths. The small stream Lybed’ ran through the city center and joined the Trubezh, a tributary of the Oka. Water was hauled by horse from the Trubezh, but better-off citizens relied on wells during the summer and fall, when heavy rains rendered delivery unreliable and the river water dirty and unpleasant to drink. In the early 1860s, the local newspaper, taking stock of conditions after Tsar Alexander II’s reforms permitted local initiatives to improve them, lamented “the absence of any social entertainment” and the “profound emptiness of the dark streets of our city” in the evening.7
Shortly after becoming a teacher at Riazan’s theological school, Petr Dmitrievich married Varvara Uspenskaia, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the priest at the city’s venerable Nikolo-Vysokovskaia Church. Petr Dmitrievich’s father-in-law, Ivan Ivanovich Uspenskii, was sixty-two years old and ailing, with a reputation as “a very strange priest.” Strong-willed like the Pavlovs, he quarreled constantly with his church superiors. Having decided that his daughter had no need of book learning, he had seen to it that she remained illiterate. According to a family chronicler, Petr Dmitrievich was attracted by her honesty and strength of character.8
Perhaps. Yet it seems more likely that the main source of Varvara Ivanovna’s charm lay elsewhere. By the late 1840s, the priesthood was badly oversubscribed, and even superior seminary graduates like Petr Dmitrievich found it difficult to acquire a parish. There were two common paths to this goal. One ran through a disheartening number of functionaries, all of whom expected a bribe. If the aspiring cleric could not pay the price—and the total could reach the astronomical sum of 200 rubles, far exceeding Petr Dmitrievich’s annual salary as a teacher—he might wait years for an appointment. The second path was simpler and much less expensive: marriage to a priest’s daughter. Retiring priests commonly traded their position for money or a pledge to marry their daughter. The match between Petr Dmitrievich and Varvara Ivanovna, then, served the interests of both elderly clergyman and aspiring priest.9
In the very year of that marriage, 1848, Ivan Uspenskii died of consumption and Petr Dmitrievich assumed his position at the Nikolo-Vysokovskaia Church. This plum post in a well-established, centrally located church offered the opportunity to serve the faith while also assuming an influential position among the local clergy and earning a good income. Petr Dmitrievich also acquired his father-in-law’s nearby home on Nikol’skaia Street. In 1849, he expanded his domain by purchasing the neighboring dwelling, undertook major repairs upon it, and moved in with his family—which now included an infant son, Ivan.10
His acquisition of a priesthood in a relatively lucrative church was a breakthrough for the Pavlov family, yet that position was hardly exalted. The life of a provincial priest in mid-nineteenth-century Russia was difficult, his duties uncomfortably varied and contradictory, and his status increasingly uncertain.
A Russian priest subsisted on two sources of income: voluntary contributions (emoluments) received from parishioners for the performance of various rites (confession, marriage, burial, and so forth) and the agricultural yield of a small plot of land attached to the church. This income depended on the nature of one’s parish and land, and for the great majority of priests it was small and unreliable. Furthermore, because the priest constantly had his palm out, he was utterly dependent on the goodwill of his flock, especially the well-heeled among them. As one Riazan clergyman conceded, this hardly predisposed the priest to criticize the behavior of parishioners. Still dependent on the land, priests remained part peasant. Many complained that hard agricultural toil diverted them from liturgical duties and undermined their spiritual authority. To bring in the harvest, many priests, unable to afford hired labor, solicited the help of parishioners, who expected the day’s labors to end with food and alcoholic refreshment.11
A pragmatic and enterprising man of unwavering faith, Petr Dmitrievich became a successful and respected practitioner of this complex and contradictory clerical art, cobbling together a comfortable existence. He received about 340 rubles a year in emoluments from church services and rented part of the family home to students and faculty at the nearby seminary. Renowned throughout Riazan province for the enviable yield of his large fruit and berry orchard, he earned additional income by running a gardening school. Laboring constantly on the land, he enlisted the enthusiastic aid of his young son Ivan and, through an arrangement with local authorities in later years, the less enthusiastic services of prisoners from the Riazan jail. That arrangement was the fruit of Petr Dmitrievich’s unwavering support of church, tsar, and local establishment—in which capacity he served as “spiritual counselor” to Riazan’s police and local regiment.
During Ivan’s early years, his father was, then, a successful clergyman and pillar of the local establishment. Just before Ivan’s departure for university, his father’s tense relations with his archbishop would lead to a catastrophic demotion, but Petr Dmitrievich absorbed this blow, adjusted, and prospered. In 1873 he became the local clergy’s representative on the governing board of the Theological Seminary, in 1877 he was promoted to archpriest, and in 1881, in a reflection of his authority among his peers, he was elected supervisor (blagochinnyi) by the local clergy. This unpaid position involved a great deal of time and energy inspecting the physical and spiritual state of Riazan’s many churches and clerical personnel, arbitrating disagreements among the clergy, checking the books, soliciting contributions (especially from church elders, who were chosen, under Petr Dmitrievich’s close eye, from among the wealthy merchants), and reporting annually to the diocese leadership. For his good service he often received blessings from local bishops and from the Holy Synod, as well as a series of official state orders, including the Order of Vladimir, which conferred the right to join the hereditary nobility.
Toward the end of his life, rumor in Riazan had it that Petr Dmitrievich was rich. The considerable sum of 6,000 rubles that he accumulated by his death made him, not wealthy, but certainly, in his nephew’s description, “very comfortable.” When, in the 1890s, a cleric who was rising in the national church bureaucracy proposed to marry Petr Dmitrievich’s daughter, the Pavlovs could reasonably suspect that he (like Petr Dmitrievich himself fifty years earlier) had his eye on her father’s holdings. Yet the family lived simply and frugally, and Petr Dmitrievich’s children found him extremely tight-fisted.12
He conducted services in relatively simple style, according to his nephew, conveying “the impression of complete naturalness, simplicity, and certain conviction.” Unlike other priests, Pavlov did not attempt to boost attendance (and revenue) by creating a special aura around selected “miraculous or especially revered and privileged sacred objects.” His sermons were sufficiently substantial and orthodox to win the approval of his peers and the ecclesiastical censor, and so to be published. Though they were noticeably shorter than those of other clerics, he rarely delivered them in their entirety.13
The shorter sermons were part of Pavlov’s liberal style as a cleric—“liberal” in the sense that he consciously adapted church formalities and discipline to the life of his parishioners. In other churches, for example, the first Easter service often continued from midnight to 5 or 6 a.m. Pavlov’s passed quickly in a “lively, noisy, and joyous” spirit, ending by 2 a.m. Such an Easter service, he explained, was pleasurable for both the living and the dead, while an overly long one became burdensome for his sleepy and hungry parishioners.14
In the same spirit, he bent the rules concerning the prerequisites of a church marriage, which was critical not only for social acceptance but also for securing property rights. Qualifying for a church marriage could be a complicated and time-consuming affair, requiring various certificates attesting to birth and baptism. The necessary documents would sometimes be lost or incomplete, and clearing this up could take at least one year—longer than, say, the several months remaining before a pregnant wife-to-be gave birth to an illegitimate child. Furthermore, a couple was ineligible for a church marriage if the wife was younger than sixteen or the husband not between the ages of eighteen and sixty, or if they were too closely related. In such cases, according to rumors in Riazan, Pavlov proved himself quite flexible and conducted “secret marriages.” He explained to his nephew that he considered such bending of church rules preferable to condemning couples to suffer the consequences of “living in sin.” Here, perhaps, empathy coincided with self-interest: many priests sanctified such marriages in exchange for bribes and, in general, to preserve the goodwill of their parishioners.15
The Pavlovs’ two-story wooden house on Nikol’skaia Street was simple, comfortable, and spacious. Entering through a courtyard, one found seven rooms on the first floor: a storeroom for firewood, a kitchen, dining room, living room, pantry, Varvara Ivanovna’s room, and her husband’s study. That study housed one of Riazan’s best private libraries—several shelves of books, mostly ecclesiastical tomes, but also secular works and novels, including collections of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Belinskii, and Pushkin. These arrived together with two Moscow newspapers and the illustrated journal Niva in the monthly mail from St. Petersburg. To receive mail from St. Petersburg was a mark of distinction—the capital was a “distant vision, like the heavens”—and the opening of these packages was a great family occasion. “One must first look through the book,” Pavlov instructed his children, so as not to “waste time on nonsense. You should read a good one two or three times.”16
The stairs leading to the second floor opened onto a pleasant sitting area in which sat a large chest with the equipment for gorodki, a traditional Russian sport and favorite family game that involved throwing a bat at a group of large wooden pins. (Ivan Petrovich would become a devotee and master.) On this floor was Petr Dmitrievich’s room and those of his children.
Guarding the courtyard to the home was the first dog in Ivan Pavlov’s life. As he recalled many decades later, it was a “real guard dog,” bristling with energy and hostility, and throwing itself constantly against its chain. “The only one of us with a relationship to it was the yard-keeper, who could tie and untie it, but nobody else could approach, for it was prepared to bite all others.”17
The family ate simply and frugally, subsisting largely on kasha (porridge), shchi (cabbage soup), and borscht (beet and cabbage soup), sometimes with a bit of meat. (Ivan would adopt his father’s simple menu when patriarch of his own family.) Unlike his two brothers, Petr Dmitrievich was a moderate drinker who occasionally indulged in a libation before supper. One corner of his study was filled with large bottles of beverages that he prepared from vodka, fruit, and sugar. These he poured ceremoniously when guests arrived and on other special occasions.18
The scraps of information we have about Varvara Ivanovna suggest a loving, intelligent, and extremely excitable and erratic woman. Her father had deliberately consigned her to illiteracy, but she became an avid reader—relating the contents of newspapers to the family and reading books from her husband’s library. (Perhaps Petr Dmitrievich himself taught her to read, using the phonetics system he developed for children.) She was also a chain-smoker, which was quite unusual for a Russian woman of her time, place, and station. Family members, including Ivan himself, later described her as irritable, unstable, and explosive, attributing her “frenzies” to the nervous disturbances and excruciating headaches that she suffered after giving birth to her first three children—and which often confined her to bed for days at a time.
Relations between the authoritarian husband and his unusual, high-strung wife were tense and sometimes combative. Petr Dmitrievich described her as a “neurasthenic” and complained that he often had to interrupt his gardening to rescue resident seminarians from his shrieking spouse, rushing inside to find her tearful and gesturing angrily with a fist. As for Varvara Ivanovna’s opinion of her husband, we have only the testimony of her chief domestic ally, her daughter Lidiia, that he was a despot.19
Born in 1849, Ivan was the Pavlovs’ first child. Nine others followed, including three who died at birth or in infancy and two others, Nikolai and Konstantin, who apparently died in childhood. Ivan’s surviving siblings were Dmitrii (born 1851), Petr (1853), Sergei (1864), and Lidiia (1874).
Petr Dmitrievich took pride in the physical strength of generations of Pavlov men and worried that his first son was feeble and extremely high-strung. Endowed with a phenomenal memory, Ivan later recalled details about being carried into the family’s new home that would date the recollection from the time when he was less than a year old. He resisted his father’s attempts to interest him in books, nor was he interested in music or art, much preferring to gather berries and help in the garden. At age eight, he learned with some difficulty the Russian alphabet and some basic rules of arithmetic, but cared little, as he had decided upon a future as a gardener. One relative described him at the time as “of small stature, even for his years, skinny, with ringlets falling on his large forehead, with grey, strikingly lively eyes.” Passionate, willful, and thin-skinned, he laughed, screamed, and argued “until the tears fell.” He had strong feelings about everything—including people, whom he tended to either love or hate. Ivan later recalled himself as a “puny, sickly lad” who was constantly at the center of “terrible quarrels,” “could spit and swear and fight,” and, indiscriminately pugnacious, frequently took a thrashing from bigger boys.20
Petr Dmitrievich attributed his son’s volatility to Varvara Ivanovna’s hereditary influence, and Ivan seems to have uncomfortably adopted that view. However lovingly, he would later describe his mother to two biographers in ways that led them to characterize her as “abnormally unbalanced.” Filling out a eugenicist’s questionnaire late in life, he noted proudly that his paternal inheritance featured “extraordinary physical strength and great abilities” and “love for physical labor”—and remained silent about his mother’s side of the family. His reply to the question about “defective relatives”—that he had none—probably concealed some uneasiness on that subject. He would always recognize in himself an inborn tendency toward overexcitability, explosiveness, and lack of control, and even late in life he recalled his father’s constant refrain that “There is much of his mother in Ivan!” Nor could he have been indifferent to the problems in his proud paternal line, having himself witnessed the dramatic drunkenness and “inner disorderliness” of his two uncles. There was, then, a psychological dimension to Pavlov’s lifelong preoccupation with balance, discipline, and self-control—and with the psyche itself. Even late in life—long after winning a Nobel Prize—he would wonder how such a congenitally imbalanced fellow as he could become a great scientist.21
When speaking about his youth in later years, Ivan frequently recalled a traumatic episode that occurred when he was about eight or nine and had an enduring influence on his sense of the life well lived. He took a bad fall off a high fence, landing on a stone platform in a neighbor’s yard. He broke some bones, and pleurisy and other complications apparently set in. For months, he failed to recover, losing his appetite and becoming so frail that his younger brothers teased him about his weakness. The Pavlovs suspected some complicating problem with his lungs and, distrusting physicians, treated him with various home remedies to no avail. Finally, Ivan’s godfather, the father superior at the nearby Troitskii Monastery, convinced the family to entrust him with their son’s welfare and whisked him away.
According to various accounts (all originating with Pavlov himself or with his family), the monk subjected his young charge to a rigid regime. During the days, Ivan engaged in vigorous physical activity—gardening, gymnastics, swimming, skating, and gorodki. During the evenings, he was confined to his room, surrounded by books. Bored silly, he began leafing through them. Eventually he became mentally engaged, and the father superior had him write accounts of each evening’s reading. Young Ivan’s favorite was Krylov’s Fables, which he received as a gift upon his departure. (That volume resided on his writing table thereafter as a source of pleasure and, no doubt, a reminder of his experience at the monastery.) The monk also noticed the boy’s ambidextrousness, and encouraged him to develop it.
We can only speculate about the psychological consequences of this episode. Pavlov left no record about the fear and helplessness he must have felt during the long uncertain months after the accident, but would speak frequently about his rescue at the monastery as a turning point in his life. The monk’s remedy for the broken boy became a tale and credo about the triumph of self-discipline, work, and regularity over the depredations of sluchainosti; a lesson about the unity of body and mind and the benefits of combining physical and mental labor. As a young man, he often honored these lessons in the breach; in later years they became the foundations of his daily existence.22
In the aftermath of Ivan’s fall and recovery, another lifelong pattern also took shape: his younger brother Dmitrii became his constant defender and protector, sidekick and nanny. Even after Ivan had fully recovered, Dmitrii watched over him, convinced that his older brother was a rare but fragile flower requiring protection. He put it this way to Ivan’s fiancée in later years: “A surprising boy, this Van’ka [diminutive for Ivan]—he talks like a wise man, but in life every cockroach leads him about by the nose!” Ivan was the serious, talented boy with the explosive temper, destined for great things; Dmitrii was the joker and jester, assigned by the family to be his brother’s helpmate, the facilitator of his destiny.23
One other childhood experience especially impressed Ivan—the Easter holiday. In Riazan, he later recalled, one day was much like the next except for Easter and Christmas. The Pavlov family fasted for the forty days of Lent, subsisting on toast, kvass (a traditional Russian beverage made from fermented bread), and watery blini (pancakes). Hungry and weak, they rejoiced during the holidays following the great fast. “During the fast, food on the table was scanty (Lenten), the weather gloomy, the church melodies mournful. And then suddenly there began the bright rejoicing of Easter with its clear sunny days, with joyous, cheerful melodies, and with an abundance of tasty delicacies.”24 Just as he preserved a lifelong commitment to the strict schedule and combination of physical and mental labor that he learned at the monastery, so, even after rejecting religious belief, would he always rejoice at the Easter holiday and insist upon celebrating it.
For the Pavlov boys, there was only one conceivable path to education and a livelihood—the theological schools and the priesthood. Each would enter the Riazan Theological School and then the Riazan Theological Seminary, availing themselves of the six-year curriculum at each institution that was offered without payment to sons of the clergy. Afterwards, perhaps, if either demonstrated distinctive ability, he would continue the Pavlov family’s ascent up the church hierarchy by attending the Theological Academy in St. Petersburg.
Because of his accident and lengthy recovery, Ivan missed the first two years at the Theological School. Petr Dmitrievich tutored him at home until 1860, when, with gifts of tea and sugar in hand, he met with the rector to enroll his two older sons. A few days later, Ivan placed in the third-year class by virtue of his ability to write from dictation, to read secular and ecclesiastical works, to respond orally to math problems, and to recite basic prayers by heart. The Pavlov brothers arrived for their first day of school in threadbare clothes sewn by their mother from their father’s worn cassocks, attire that would see them through seminary as well.25
The church’s educational institutions had fallen upon extremely hard times. Poorly financed, housed in dilapidated facilities, and often staffed by appallingly bad teachers, they were widely criticized by both lay and ecclesiastical commentators. In his influential critique of the state of the clergy, the priest Ioann Belliustin concluded bluntly in 1858 that “most of the teachers in district [ecclesiastical] schools are monumental ignoramuses.” They were usually marking time until they could find a profitable parish, and possessed “only a nodding familiarity with the rudiments of the subject they teach.” Corporal punishment was widespread and often meted out to those whose parents failed to pay extra, extorted fees.26
Years later, Ivan recalled his first day at school, and his first class—Latin. The weather was warm but the teacher, a short, rotund, blushing man, wore an enormous Siberian fur coat. Entering the classroom, he pulled a book out of his coat pocket, spat on his fingers, opened to the first page, and began to read “marvelous words” about the great heroes of ancient Rome. “But the simpler the content, the more the teacher embellished the story with introductory propositions, loud epithets, unlimited generalizations. And the thread was lost.” Looking around, Ivan noticed that nobody was paying attention. The teacher closed his book with a sigh of satisfaction and called first on one student, then, pointedly, at another who was making faces at a classmate. A well-known ruffian was summoned to grab the unruly student and haul him out of class. The lesson continued. When one student interrupted the reading with loud laughter, the instructor grabbed the culprit by the hair and dragged him to a table. He raised his hand as if to strike—but the bell rang. Class was over. Encountering the teacher on the street shortly thereafter, Ivan noticed that he reeked of vodka.27
He attended three two-hour classes each day, except for an abbreviated Saturday and Sundays in church. The curriculum emphasized rote memorization, a great strength of Ivan’s. The two most important subjects were Latin and Greek, followed by catechism and biblical history. His written assignments for Latin and Greek were ranked first in his class during all his years at the school. In other subjects—catechism, prayer, sacred history, church statutes, Slavonic and Russian grammar, arithmetic, and geography—his grades were mediocre to poor in the first year, rising thereafter to the top 10 to 20 percent of his class, except for singing, in which his lack of talent was notable. Upon graduation in June 1864, his native ability, performance, and behavior were all assessed as ves’ma khorosho—that is, not excellent, but better than merely good; a solid B+ student in current U.S. terms.28
As Ivan headed next for the Riazan Theological Seminary, his father no doubt proudly contemplated his future in the priesthood. Times, however, were changing.