G. H. Lewes’s sketch of a mammal’s internal organs. George Henry Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackburn and Sons, 1859), 230
The period of dramatic social change and cultural ferment in Russia known as “the sixties” began in 1855 with Alexander II’s ascension to the throne. Coming to power in the wake of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the new tsar implemented a series of fundamental reforms to rectify the internal weaknesses thought responsible for it. Most momentous was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, but he also modernized the army, reformed the judiciary, granted limited autonomy to local governing bodies (the zemstvos), relaxed censorship, and loosened bureaucratic controls on universities. Ecclesiastical institutions, a bulwark of the state, were also reformed to transform the clergy from a hereditary caste to a modern profession capable of defending Orthodoxy and tsarism from the wave of subversive ideologies and values set loose by the Great Reforms.
The “Tsar Liberator” hoped to modernize Russia while preserving the basic tsarist political system against the forces and values generated by modernization—an extremely difficult, inherently contradictory path that he and his successors attempted to negotiate for the next half century. The price of reform included the decline of the class most reliably supportive of tsarism—the landed gentry—and the destabilizing development of capitalism, with the growth of a middle class and professional groups pressing for political and cultural freedoms, an evolving and sometimes explosive peasantry, and an urban proletariat forged from the emancipated but landless peasants who streamed into the cities. The newly independent judiciary proved an ineffective tool of the state against increasing crime and political violence.1
The difficulties of authoritarian modernization were evident in one element of the tsar’s vision that rippled outward from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to profoundly alter the life of a young seminarian in provincial Riazan—the development of Russian science. Scientific knowledge was widely considered an indispensable source of state and societal power, of technological, industrial, and military strength. Yet in the 1860s science also brought with it values that seemed inimical to those at the foundation of Russia’s church and state.
The need for science—and the threat it posed—were particularly evident regarding medicine. Russia’s traumatic defeat in the Crimean War had demonstrated the military importance of an effective medical community, and the reforms of the 1860s, which encouraged the accelerating migration of peasants to the cities, put qualitatively greater demands upon urban medical institutions. The country’s magnificent capital, St. Petersburg, was notorious as “Europe’s deadliest city”—and Russia’s mortality rate, as well as its incidence of dysentery, tuberculosis, typhus, and most other diseases, far exceeded that of Western Europe. Recognition of the desperate need for improved health services for the general population and, especially, the military led in the Reform Era to a substantial increase in state funding for medical institutions and the training of increased numbers of physicians, and enabled the medical professions to secure rights of assembly, association, and publicity denied to other professional groups.
The leaders of Russia’s medical establishment stressed, however, that the improvement of Russian medicine required not only more but also better-trained physicians. They insisted that the rapid progress of medical science in Europe was inextricably connected with the triumph of “scientific positivism,” with “the application of exact physical and chemical methods to the study of biological phenomena.” Russia could not afford to lag behind. So Russia’s leading medical institution, St. Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy, revised its curriculum to provide students with a basic knowledge of the methods and results of natural science, and expanded its faculty to include young scientists who had imbibed in Western Europe the spirit and methods of scientific positivism.2
Yet science, particularly the biological sciences, brought with it values inimical to the tsarist social order. This was the era of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), with their naturalistic explanation of the origin of plants, animals, and humans, and of Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), with its insistence that the emerging scientific basis of medicine, experimental physiology, must ignore vitalistic “essences” in investigating the life of organisms. It was also the era of the acclaimed “1847 Group”—which included leading German physiologists Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and Carl Ludwig, who proclaimed their goal of explaining all biological and psychological phenomena in terms of physics and chemistry.
There were dissenters, of course, but the times favored the materialist tide, and evolutionism, physiology, and biological approaches to mind all posed challenges to a central tenet of tsarist ideology: the notion of an inborn, immaterial “spiritual dimension of man” that lent humans a special status in nature, separating them from the animal world and tying them to God, the church, and the social and moral order of tsarism. The contradictory mission of tsarist modernization, then, entailed somehow encouraging the development of science while discouraging the subversive values so closely associated with it.
That mission was especially difficult because the same reforms that shook traditional Russia to its foundations also awakened the country’s dormant civil society. The “people of the sixties” (shestidesiatniki) now eagerly discussed and debated the nation’s prospects. One participant later recalled the passionate intensity of those years: “This was a wonderful age, an age when every person aspired to think, read, and study.... Thought, previously dormant, was awakened and set to work: its impulse was forceful and its tasks titanic.” Even in provincial Riazan, gatherings to play cards turned into discussion circles on the pressing issues of the day, and the city garden became the venue for heated political arguments.3
Just as the old order had been captured in the pledge of Alexander II’s predecessor, Tsar Nicholas I, to defend “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality,” so did the shestidesiatniki declare their allegiance to Positive Knowledge, Modernization, and Westernization. These loyalties were bound together by a fervent faith in science, not simply as a force for technological and medical progress, but as the generator of truths subversive of the tsarist order. In the pages of such journals as Contemporary and Russian Word, and most insistently in the essays of Dmitrii Pisarev, science became the symbol and instrument of the new, emerging, modernizing Russia, the true path away from the obfuscatory metaphysics, injustice, and social backwardness of church and tsar toward positive knowledge, a scientific worldview, social and technological progress, and the rational control of human destiny.
A new Russian intelligentsia was born, drawn especially from the sons and daughters of two relatively well-educated groups whose prospects and social status declined precipitously in the Reform Era: the landed gentry and the clergy. For many youth of the 1860s, their parents’ lives on the estate or in service to the church were emblematic of the old, doomed order at a time when a new, exciting Russia beckoned. The clash of generations portrayed in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Children (1862) was reproduced in many households, including that of the Pavlovs. Many of the “children” abandoned family traditions to become founding members of Russia’s independent scientific community. Among them would be Petr Dmitrievich’s three eldest sons—first Ivan, then his younger brothers Dmitrii and Petr.
* * *
Bright young seminarians who absorbed the enthusiasms of the time could hardly fail to notice that their school exemplified the backwardness of Old Russia. Poorly funded and reliant on harsh discipline, the great majority of seminaries, according to Ioann Belliustin’s scathing and widely accepted assessment, combined an incompetent faculty with an outmoded curriculum. The faculty was generally uninspired, teaching a range of subjects in which they had little if any expertise, and was often most enthusiastic about extorting bribes from the parents of seminarians, a protection racket facilitated by the harshness and brutality of seminary life.”They do not have the pupil seek truth through his own thinking,” Belliustin complained, but rather forced him to parrot outmoded compilations “devoid of sense and meaning.” The typical seminary graduate emerged “totally vacuous, lacking any positive, fully mastered body of knowledge.” Some very learned people had indeed emerged from these schools, but this Belliustin attributed to the ability of isolated, talented individuals to overcome great disadvantages. Graduates who became village priests, on the other hand, were “condemned to eternal ignorance.”4
Founded in 1722, Riazan’s seminary conformed in some ways to this sorry description, but it clearly had redeeming features. Its graduates frequently rose to important positions in both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. Among them in the mid–nineteenth century were fifteen archbishops; many faculty members at the theological academies in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev; professors of theology and history at the nation’s universities; and professors of anatomy, pathology, and ophthalmology at St. Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy.
Ivan later recalled his time at the seminary “with gratitude,” remembering several excellent teachers, including Feofilakt Orlov, a “high, ideal type” who befriended him while boarding in the Pavlov home. Unlike other teachers, Orlov addressed pupils using the respectful pronoun Vy, and, in sharp contrast to the alcoholic Latinist in the Theological School, he brought Greek alive with his passion and erudition, delighting Ivan by reciting passages from The Odyssey and The Iliad for hours from memory. A devoted stargazer, Orlov infused his pupil with a lifelong amateur interest in astronomy.
Ivan also appreciated one feature of seminary culture: students who demonstrated aptitude in one subject were respectfully granted latitude for weaknesses in others. At the neighboring gymnasium, fascination with one subject at the expense of another might lead to expulsion, but at the seminary “it brought only respect, special attention, for might this not be a talent revealing itself?”5
He also apparently enjoyed the seminary’s emphasis on competition and debate. Four times a year the school staged a public debate in Latin and Russian. It was a most ceremonial occasion. City leaders attended, the hall was adorned with flowers, and the seminary orchestra played. Students participated on the basis of carefully prepared written statements. During intervals between debates, they read their own poetry and staged scenes from classical literature, and the day ended with a big meal. The two subjects in which Ivan consistently ranked first in his class were written assignments in Latin and Russian (not Latin and Russian per se). These, perhaps, represented the preparatory work for debates. It also seems likely that the poetry he wrote during his student years was stimulated by these occasions. In any case, he developed an avidity and talent for argument in both formal and informal settings.6
Yet he acknowledged years later to a biographer that his seminary years also left “many bitter traces,” perhaps from the constant reminders of his low social status. In her novel Bariton (The baritone, 1857), Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia described the humiliating life of Riazan seminarians. During holidays they made the rounds of well-off homes, singing religious songs in the hope of receiving a few kopecks. Aristocratic families barely permitted seminarians past their thresholds; the merchants were more hospitable, but they, too, maintained a suitable social distance. Even petty bureaucrats, who fraternized with the seminarians during holidays, reasserted their higher social station at other times. “The seminarians comprise a completely separate caste and are gratified by the slightest attention, the slightest friendly gesture from society.”7
This experience may explain the prickly defensiveness about his social origins that Ivan would display during his first decade in St. Petersburg, especially when confronted by people of noble birth (and those who he assumed mistakenly were of noble birth). In later years, he would refer to himself in official documents as “from the clergy” and “from the gentry” (Petr Dmitrievich earned the latter status by receiving the Order of Vladimir in 1894). In conversation, he identified himself consistently as a child of the clergy and a raznochinets, an old term that reemerged in the 1860s to describe people of mixed background below the landed gentry—children of priests, petty bureaucrats, and declining gentry who had abandoned their family’s traditional calling.
The approach to life that had guided the monk’s remedy for Ivan’s ailments after his fall—the emphasis upon balance, self-discipline, and the integration of body and mind—was an explicit part of the culture at the seminary, where it was undergirded by the certainties of faith and theological doctrine on the relations between body and mind, Man and God.
Living at home rather than at the dormitory, Ivan was not fully subject to the all-encompassing discipline of the seminary, yet his daily schedule dovetailed with that for dormitory residents. All students were to rise at 6 a.m.; dress, pray, and breakfast from 6 to 7; and prepare for their lessons on classical subjects from 7 to 8. The hours 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. were spent in the classroom, except for Thursdays and Saturdays (when classes ended at 12:30). From 3 to 5 in the afternoon, students were to eat supper, walk, and exercise, “facilitating the development of physical strength.” From 6 p.m. until 8:30, they were to prepare for their lessons on classical subjects. They dined at 8:30, after which they engaged in “free exercise in Church song” and gathered for prayer. 10:00 was lights out. Sundays and holidays, of course, were spent in church.
“This schedule, especially the hours of prayer, must be observed with complete punctuality,” seminary statutes decreed. Seminarians were forbidden to exchange, sell, or accumulate possessions—and were expressly forbidden to “read books of their own choosing, especially books with ideas contrary to morality and Church doctrine.” Those living outside the dorm were bound by the same strictures, which were enforced by a trustworthy senior student appointed by the seminary inspector. That trustee visited his younger charges daily and reported any infractions of the rules.
The 470 students at Riazan Seminary in the year of Ivan’s matriculation were all from clerical families, overwhelmingly from impoverished rural ones, and studied there a classical ecclesiastical curriculum that emphasized church doctrine and history while also preparing students in history, literature, foreign languages, and math. The natural sciences were represented by only one course on physics and cosmography. To prepare for their future work on church plots, seminarians also took an ungraded course on agriculture. As in other seminaries, teachers were hired without regard to special knowledge, and each taught a variety of subjects. Ivan’s favorite, Feofilakt Orlov, taught general history, German, French, and Greek; Nikolai Glebov, author of a text on psychology, also taught physics, math, Greek, and Russian history.8
At seminary, Ivan’s circle consisted mainly of his two brothers, Dmitrii and Petr, and two students from the countryside, Nikolai Bystrov and Ivan Chel’tsov, both sons of the rural clergy who rented corners in the Pavlov home.9 They quickly distinguished themselves as enthusiastic, well-behaved, and talented students. During their first years at the seminary, Ivan and Bystrov ranked at the very top of their class, numbers one and two in almost every subject, with Chel’tsov close behind. Ivan’s school papers were destroyed in a fire years later, but the general contours of his studies, and his first academic encounter with the contentious issue of the relationship of body and mind, can be reconstructed from archival materials.
In his first year at the seminary, he studied Eastern Orthodox religion, general history, mathematics (algebra), Greek, and Latin. Students all submitted eight written essays (perhaps for the debates), six in Russian and two in Latin, and Ivan’s grades for these were the best in the class. In his second year, he studied poetry and literature, Holy Scripture, the doctrine and use of prayer books, Russian history, Greek, Latin, German, mathematics (geometry), philology, and literature. His third year, 1866–1867, was the last before the Holy Synod’s major educational reform. He again excelled in courses on Holy Scripture, logic, biblical history, Russian history, physics and cosmology, Latin, Greek, German, and French, ranking overall second in the class behind Bystrov.10
The detailed descriptions submitted by teachers provide some sense of the course content. Instruction on Church and biblical history began at the very beginning: “Where does Church history begin? Where do we learn about the beginning of the world? The order and sequence of creation, ... the origin of the Church, the perfection of reason in man’s original state, the perfection of his will, original religion” and so forth. Sacred Writings addressed the history and content of the Bible. Moral theology concerned the history and content of Christian moral doctrine, including “the moral law of God and moral acts of man in general. On the moral nature of man, his high dostoinstvo [moral dignity and obligations] and calling.”11
Some courses explicitly confronted the heretical views popular in the 1860s. Moral theology addressed differences between the Christian and the naturalistic views of virtue, offered refutations of various “rationalist negative critics” to the Christian view of hope, and refuted claims that science contradicted Christian doctrine. Basic theology did battle against materialism, atheism, and pantheism.12
In language classes, Ivan and his classmates wrote essays on such topics as “Imagine more frequently your Guardian Angel” and “God in the Wise Construction of Earth,” and translated from German works on “The Five Senses” and “Do Good When You are Able.” Orlov’s class on world history examined the ancient history of China, India, Egypt, and Greece. Philology and literature concentrated on the historical influences on the Russian language from the time of Peter the Great.13
* * *
It was in a seminary classroom during the first six months of 1867 that Ivan at age seventeen received the only formal instruction of his life in psychology. The course on logic and psychology was taught by the young cleric Nikolai Glebov, a much-praised graduate of the Moscow Theological Academy, member of the local censorship committee, editor of the Riazan Diocese News, and author of the seminary’s textbook Psychology. Glebov elaborated in sophisticated fashion the same basic view of mind, body, and psychology that Ivan imbibed in church and at home. His course is interesting, not only as a point of departure for Pavlov’s lifelong involvement in this set of issues, but also because it contrasted so sharply with the views he was absorbing simultaneously from his heroes among the shestidesiatniki.
Psychology, Glebov explained, is “the science of the human soul—its qualities, abilities, actions, and states.” Recently, both in the West and Russia, “there has been a terrible strengthening of materialism, which sees in the human soul (dusha) only a greater development of the soul of animals, proposing that there exists only a quantitative, not a qualitative, distinction between them.” Materialists argued that there was “no thought without the brain, that spiritual activity is a function of the brain matter”—and so “the honest, faithful, and scholarly psychologist must ... resist these false philosophizers, demonstrate the contradictoriness of their systems, the superficiality of their conclusions, and the cunning and impertinence of their sophisms.”14
We recognize in ourselves two forms of existence, Glebov explained: the body, a “mass of material particles, as life in space and time,” and the soul, which inhabits a spaceless realm as a “spiritual, independent, conscious and free force, displaying its activity in thoughts, feelings, and desires, and living in connection with the corporeal organism.”15 The soul is manifest in human beings’ higher, active self—in consciousness and self-consciousness, understanding, conscience, spirituality, and freedom of the will; but also in attention, representation, memory, convictions, intellect, and feelings. By his corporeal, animal side, Man is “completely limited by the external material conditions of life,” but the soul is an active force that transcends such circumstances. Contrary to materialist doctrine, conscience was not the result of moral upbringing and environment, but rather the “expression of our internal moral law, written upon our hearts. At its basis lies our inborn idea of the mind, of holiness, which is the internal purity of the will, and of the idea of goodness, which is love.”
Human psychology, then, is governed by the complex play of body and soul—the former responding passively to external material conditions, the latter acting independently of them. Images from the external world impress themselves upon our sensory organs, but only the soul’s “free turning to them of spiritual power” creates mental images, and only the active intervention of the soul’s quality of consciousness creates memories, fantasies, and judgments. Sensationalists were, then, incorrect to attribute all ideas to the simple mechanistic association of sensory impressions. Nor was Man merely a thinking machine. Free will expresses internalized moral law and is reflected in character, “the forward movement of our aspirations according to a determined plan.”16
The mysterious connection between material body and immaterial soul, Glebov readily conceded, renders spiritual life sensitive to corporeal processes, particularly to those in the brain and nervous system. Nervous impulses, and so the exercise of our will, are transmitted at a specific, physiologically determined speed. Feelings, too, flow through the nerves. The “small brain” (subcortex) participates in mental operations and is the seat of sensation and the will, as attested to by its wealth of nerve centers. The circulatory system represents a “hydraulic machine,” and its mechanical operation also influences the operation of the will. Blood flow influences mental images, and its rapidity differs among human types. Rapid circulation among sanguinics corresponds to their “rapid and easy flow of thoughts,” while slower circulation among melancholics harmonizes with “their thoughtfulness and apathy toward daily life and their surroundings.” Citing George Henry Lewes’s popular Physiology of the Common Life (1859), Glebov noted the interdependence of digestion, health, and happiness. Poor digestion harms thought (if food particles in the blood are “too crude,” they “obstruct mental activities”) and can spoil a person’s character. Conversely, when unhappy we lose our appetite, and when content we spend more time at the table “and eat twice as much.”17
Ivan absorbed Glebov’s perspective well enough to earn a grade of “excellent” in the course and to rank second behind Bystrov in the year-end exam on logic and psychology. Yet he had by this time completely and utterly rejected it. We must imagine him sitting in Glebov’s class (and others), diligently taking notes and replying to questions as expected while privately viewing as backward the ideas he was obediently regurgitating. The seminary’s well-informed inspector of students reported that “I have never noticed in him any ideas contrary to the Christian religion or harmful to the state.” Yet he was expressing such ideas enthusiastically within his own circle and in angry arguments with his father.18
Shortly after the end of Glebov’s class and Ivan’s third year at the seminary, in summer 1867, the local clergy elected Petr Dmitrievich to the committee charged with implementing the Holy Synod’s long-awaited reform of ecclesiastical education. During Ivan’s fourth year at the seminary, a number of veteran instructors—generalists who for years had taught three or four different subjects without expertise in any of them—were fired. Specialists were hired, and the curriculum was changed—for example, a course in pedagogy was added to prepare clerics more effectively to combat the rising tide of “pernicious ideas.” Students were then examined to weed out the weak ones and sort those remaining in a new class structure. Ivan performed quite well in those exams: first in his class in Latin; second behind Bystrov in Holy Writings, logic, and psychology; and among the top four in biblical history, Russian history, German, and physics.
That proved his last year as a superlative seminarian. During his next, fifth, year, he dropped out of the top 15 percent of his class, and sometime during summer 1869 decided not to enroll for the sixth and final year. He would not, after all, become a priest. His imagination had been captured by the spirit of the 1860s and by another, secular, faith.19
* * *
Until Ivan’s adolescence, the only substantial library in Riazan belonged to the seminary. That changed at the initiative of liberal writer and satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who was appointed deputy governor of the Riazan region in 1858 and charged with cleaning up corruption in the local government. He complained constantly to his friends about the low educational and cultural level in provincial Riazan. “Here I am surrounded by illiterate people,” he informed one correspondent, adding wryly that one former seminarian, a hopeless alcoholic, was considered invaluable to the local bureaucracy because, when sober, he had a good grasp of the Russian alphabet and rules of punctuation. To remedy the situation, Saltykov-Shchedrin immediately took the initiative to create a substantial public library.
The library was an instant success in Reform Era Riazan, with patron visits rising rapidly to 3,000 by 1861 and 13,000 in 1864. Fully half of these user visits were by students; the next largest contingent, at 5,000, was gentry and bureaucrats. Only 226 visitors were women, who were just beginning to benefit from the shestidesiatniki’s emphasis upon women’s liberation. Many visitors borrowed Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, and Turgenev; the conservative journals Russian Herald and Time (edited by Dostoevsky); and various official publications. Those closely attuned to the new spirit of the 1860s, however, competed for copies of the radical Russian Word and Contemporary; the popular science journal Herald of the Natural Sciences; new Russian translations of the works of “vulgar materialists” Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner; lectures by physiologist Claude Bernard; and Lewes’s controversial Physiology of the Common Life.20
Many of these works, of course, were unavailable at the seminary library, where, curricular reform notwithstanding, authorities were denying its newly hired specialists permission to acquaint students with even much tamer fare. Petr Rubin, who arrived from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy to replace Glebov as instructor in psychology, was refused permission to use Alexander Bain’s On the Study of Character, Lewes’s Physiology of the Common Life, Adolphe Quetelet’s Man and the Development of his Capacities, and Wilhelm Wundt’s Lectures on the Human and Animal Mind. None of these authors were materialists. All believed in some form of mind-body parallelism or declared the nature of the mind-body relationship beyond the province of positive science, but their works all rested upon the assumption that human psychology could be meaningfully discussed and investigated without recourse to the religious concept of the soul. As the Holy Synod’s censor put it, this devaluation of “the spiritual dimension of man” demoted him “from his rightful place and included [him] in the common herd of animals.” Rubin left after one semester and his successor returned to Glebov’s textbook.
In Alexander II’s modernizing Russia, however, secular society—and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s public library—had its own standards. In 1866 the St. Petersburg District Court overruled the ecclesiastical censor’s suppression of Wundt’s Lectures on the Human and Animal Mind and a new edition of Ivan Sechenov’s Reflexes of the Brain. “There is practically no scientific work that has no direct or indirect relationship to spiritual subjects,” the court concluded in the Wundt case, so if the church censor were granted authority over science, the tsar’s liberalization of censorship would “not exist for scientific works.” Similarly, although it determined that Sechenov’s work was perniciously materialist, the court decided to allow publication because to do otherwise would have “an unfavorable effect on the activities of Russian scientists.” In each case, the court overruled the ecclesiastical censor in the name of scientific progress. Implementation of this general principle guaranteed that journals and books banned in the seminary became available in the public library.21
Probably by 1864–1865, Ivan and his friends Bystrov and Chel’tsov, ignoring the seminary statute forbidding students to “read books of their own choosing, especially books with ideas contrary to morality and Church doctrine,” awoke early to join the line of seminarians and gymnasium students awaiting the opening of the public library. Passions were high, and when the door opened the surge of bodies often resulted in a fistfight.
The prizes were precisely the works most feared by their seminary teachers: issues of Contemporary and Russian Word with essays by Dobroliubov, Chernyshevskii, and especially Pisarev, or one of the flood of translated Western scientific works pouring out of Russian presses. Pooling their acquisitions, they would read virtually around the clock, ignoring their lessons and other distractions.
“Who does not remember the true, inconsolable grief, the gnawing melancholy, when there was no chance to acquire books,” Ivan recalled of this time a decade later. “Can one forget the passion with which you captured a long-desired book? I can now see clearly the scene as several of us seminarians and gymnasium students stand for hours on a dirty, cold autumn day before the locked door of the public library in order to be the first to capture an issue of Russian Word with an article by Pisarev.... And the shiver that ran through the body when encountering a person or book that said something you considered untrue. And the despair when the force of new facts and ideas destroy your old gods. Is this not intellectual activity!” His circle consumed library books and articles voraciously, and argued passionately about them. The nighttime hours flew by unnoticed while they were “occupied with a book, a letter, a thought,” driven, not by parents and teachers—who, indeed, sought to restrain them—but by their own intellectual curiosity, their own “strong need.”22
The worldview that Ivan absorbed from these readings and discussions would remain essentially unchanged during his lifetime: the scientific method was identical whether one analyzed a rock, a plant, a frog, a human, or human society; real scientific explanations were mechanistic in each case, since organisms (including humans) were but complex machines; and science, free of empty philosophizing, was the only true path to plentiful production, social justice, and human progress—that is, to humans’ rational control of their own destiny.
Catching up on back issues of Contemporary, he found the early essays of the shestidesiatniki. Most important was Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy” (1860), a statement of Feuerbachian materialism that must have seemed aimed directly against the dualism taught in seminary. The “anthropological principle” was this: “All the phenomena of the moral world originate from one another and from external circumstances in conformity with the law of causality.” The study of life was but a branch of chemistry. The psyches of animals and humans were essentially the same. Both exhibited memory, imagination, reason, consciousness, and a set of ideals—so the same basic processes occurred in Newton’s brain and that of a chicken. Human desires and the illusion of free will hardly attested to any “spiritual dimension of man”—they were, rather, merely subjective manifestations of the objective, causal processes studied by scientists.23
By the time Ivan was devouring the “thick journals,” Russian Word had supplanted Contemporary—and its emphasis upon science and scientific materialism was considerably more single-minded and strident. Contemporary had never embraced scientism, the view that science is the central force for social and moral progress. Agitating constantly for political freedoms, social reforms, and socialism (though that word itself was forbidden by the censor), its essayists argued that the peasantry with its collective instincts would lead the way to a new, more just Russia. Russian Word, on the other hand, was devoted to the development of a new Russian lichnost’ (individual, or personality), to what Pisarev termed a “thinking proletariat” that, steeped in the insights and methodologies of science, would lead the way to a modern and just Russia. In the pages of Russian Word, the popularization of science was not just one element of a radical program—it became “the most important world-historic task of our century.” Characterizing the journal’s message later with only slight hyperbole, one of its advocates put it this way: “The [physiologist’s] frog will save the world.”24
The journal’s star, Dmitrii Pisarev, was Pavlov’s favorite essayist, pressing these themes with particular relentlessness and flair. “Mankind has only one evil—ignorance,” Pisarev wrote, “and against this evil there is only one medicine—science.” Political struggle, mass movements, and social revolutions accomplished little. “Thought, and thought alone, can reconstruct and renovate the entire structure of human life.” Science was the only human activity that transcended interest group, place, and time, so “Only the natural scientists work for mankind in general.” Effective human labor was based on science, and ever more so in the modern industrial age. Russia’s greatest need, then, was to develop its meager scientific cadres and to spread a rational, scientific mentality throughout the land. This cadre of scientifically knowledgeable, rational, and disciplined individuals—this thinking proletariat—would lead the way to Russia’s modernization. Youth should eschew mere aesthetics, and writers should popularize scientific works that provided a “true, rational, and broad view of nature, man, and society”—a task Pisarev assumed, for example, by writing one of Russia’s first popular essays about Darwin’s theory. For Pisarev, Contemporary’s essayists erred in placing a populist wager on the backward peasantry and its collectivist instincts. “If you want to educate the folk, raise the level of education in civilized society,” he urged. “The fate of the folk is resolved ... in the universities.”25
Ivan cited Pisarev constantly in heated conversations with his friends and family, especially his devout father. Insisting that “Nature is not a cathedral but a workshop,” he followed Pisarev in embracing the “nihilist” Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Children, with his assertion that a single decent German chemist was worth a dozen poets.26
Perhaps Ivan’s silent acquiescence at seminary to Glebov’s dualist psychology reflected his internalization of Pisarev’s indifference to political struggle. Or perhaps it expressed his sense of propriety or the “profoundly practical cast of mind” that Feofilakt Orlov’s son noticed in conversations with the young man. Each impulse led in the same direction: He would behave as he must to avoid being tagged as a dissident, to reach university, and become a scientifically trained thinking proletarian.27
Ivan’s other favorite nonscientific author was Samuel Smiles, a leading British popularizer of bourgeois Victorian values, whose Self-Help and Lives of the Engineers emphasized the importance of character, self-discipline, and purposeful hard work. By imposing their will upon nature, Smiles’s heroic engineers promoted reliable, gradual social progress. Ivan could recite from memory lengthy passages from Self-Help (first translated into Russian in 1866 as Samodeiatel’nost’—the same term Glebov used to denote the active powers of the soul), a collection of essays and aphorisms on the centrality of character and the virtues of industriousness, perseverance, self-discipline, regularity, punctuality, and honesty. “The crown and glory of life is character,” Smiles wrote, which is “moral order embodied in the individual.” “The common highway of steady industry and application is the only safe road to travel,” and “this art of seizing opportunity and turning even accidents to account, bending them to some purpose, is a great secret of success.”28
Smiles’s secular yet moralistic credo of self-control must also have touched Ivan deeply for more personal reasons—resonating both with his experience of salvation through discipline at his godfather’s monastery and with his constant difficulties managing his own passionate nature and uncontrollable temper. The British author also translated into secular language values that Ivan had imbibed at home and seminary. Smiles’s emphasis on self-directedness, discipline, and character resonated with two words important to Ivan throughout his life: tselesoobraznost’, or purposefulness—a term he would use constantly to describe both a human virtue and an inherent quality of the animal machine; and dostoinstvo, a word connoting moral honor, self-worth, and dignity. The Russian radical Pisarev and the British bourgeois Smiles, then, offered mutually reinforcing guidance and wisdom. Just as Pisarev’s essays pointed to the centrality of science to social progress and emphasized the role of the individual while devaluing political action, so Smiles’s aphorisms and heroic tales appealed to the young Pavlov as both descriptions of Pisarev’s thinking proletarians in action and as morally resonant guidelines for personal and professional success in a modernizing society.
* * *
Many years later, Pavlov would recall with special emotion the impression created by three other works—each concerning physiology—that captured the imagination of the shestidesiatniki: Russian physiologist Ivan Sechenov’s Reflexes of the Brain, British philosopher George Henry Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life, and the lectures of French physiologist Claude Bernard. None of these authors were radicals, yet all were heroes of the day for their espousal of a modern science of life, physiology, free from Glebov-like speculation about the immaterial soul.
Just as the essays of Chernyshevskii and Pisarev elaborated a worldview in sharp contrast to that which Ivan had imbibed at home and in the seminary, so Sechenov’s Reflexes of the Brain illustrated how a vanguard figure of the thinking proletariat, a scientist, might approach the psyche and its relationship to the body. Originally titled “An Attempt to Establish the Physiological Foundations of Psychical Processes,” Reflexes of the Brain was written to defend Chernyshevskii’s anthropological principle against conservative criticism. Sechenov had been on leave from the Medical-Surgical Academy in February 1863, working on his theory of central inhibitory centers in Claude Bernard’s Parisian laboratory, when he received a request to contribute an essay to Contemporary. The conservative philosopher P. D. Iurkevich had trenchantly criticized Chernyshevskii’s essay, and Sechenov was asked to reply in the name of science. Sechenov’s theory of central inhibition (which he arrived at hurriedly) was clearly framed by his sympathy with Bernard, Darwin, and the materialist physiologists of the German 1847 Group. He portrayed the organism as adaptive and self-regulating, and his postulated inhibitory centers in the brain provided a mechanistic explanation for the frequent asymmetry between stimulus and response that in humans was traditionally attributed to free will.29
Sechenov’s explicit goal was “To explain the external activity of a man with an ideally strong will, who is acting on some high moral principle and is clearly conscious of every step he takes; ... to show that such activity—although it is voluntary in the highest degree—can be explained as the function of the anatomical scheme already given to the reader.” Adopting a conversational yet authoritative tone, Sechenov acknowledged the lack of physiological experiments on volitional acts and his frequent resort to speculation in order to traverse the considerable distance between experiments on frogs and conclusions about the human psyche.
His argument was basically this: Involuntary movements often appear purposive; for example, a decapitated frog withdraws its foot from acid. Yet scientists can explain this—without recourse to a soul—as the result of reflex action, as a simple case of stimulus and response. The essential difference between involuntary and voluntary movements is that the latter exhibit asymmetry between stimulus and response. But this, Sechenov contended on the basis of his experiments, could be explained as the result of centers in the brain that augment or inhibit reflex reactions, and by the association of chains of reflexes. Since these mechanisms are themselves reflexive in nature, even the most conscious, complex, and voluntary actions are actually reflexive. Thought, or conscious motivation, was but the second element in a tripartite reflex, or, as Sechenov put it, “the first two-thirds of a psychical reflex” (stimulus-thought-response). Emotion is “by nature, augmented reflexes.” Because thought and emotion complicate the relationship between stimulus and response—causing asymmetry in their intensity, and separating them in time—an illusion is created that they are independent of their original stimulus.
For Sechenov, the human personality resulted from the associations of “an immense series of psychical reflexes” created by experience and education. A “noble type” resulted, for example, when the child identified with and emulated a knight—first through visual associations, which led him to don a toy sword and helmet, then, through “repeated acoustic reflexes (stories),” leading him to assume knightly virtues. “Introduce an aversion for vice into the composition of the knight in the story—and the child will despise vice.... Make your knight help the weak against the strong—and the child becomes a Don Quixote: the thought of the defenselessness of the weak makes him tremble. Blending himself with his favorite image, the child begins by loving all the properties of this image; later, as a result of analysis, he loves only its moral properties. Such is the whole moral side of man.”
In a conclusion suppressed by the censor, Sechenov insisted that his determinism was compatible with human virtue and morality. People would always prefer a good machine to a bad one, and an understanding of the forces determining human nature could only reinforce “the greatest of human virtues—all-forgiving love, that is, complete indulgence toward one’s neighbor.”30
Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life also delighted Russian freethinkers, who found in it support for their position that science was seizing the study of human sensation from metaphysicians and psychologists. (Lewes’s positivism also endeared him to conservative intellectuals, who claimed his support in separating the prestige of science from materialist metaphysics.) Ivan considered this work a “striking epigraph” to Pisarev’s arguments, and convinced his father to buy him a copy, which remained thereafter a treasured part of his library. One image in Lewes’s volume especially captured his imagination with its portrayal of the physiologist’s approach to the animal machine. Many years later, he plucked this book off the library shelf of a friend, turned directly to the illustration reproduced on page 35 and recalled that, as a youth, “I was greatly intrigued by this picture. I asked myself: How does such a complicated system work?”31
G. H. Lewes’s sketch of a mammal’s internal organs. George Henry Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackburn and Sons, 1859), 230
Lewes had reproduced this sketch from a work by Claude Bernard, whom Pavlov also later remembered as an important early influence. Bernard was a prestigious figure among the Russian intelligentsia at this time, and his works were quickly translated into Russian. For Russia’s nascent physiological community, he was a prophet of their professionalizing discipline. Like Lewes, Bernard was venerated by political thinkers of various stripes who claimed him for their own view of science and the organism. Radicals emphasized his insistence on emancipating modern physiology from idealist philosophy, and so, for example, republished an essay of his that the censor found “pernicious” for its undermining of esteemed “teleological truths.” Yet it was conservative intellectual Nikolai Strakhov who first translated into Russian Bernard’s An Introduction to Experimental Medicine (1865). For Strakhov, this work ably distinguished true science, sober experimentalism, and positive knowledge from the fashionable vulgarisms of Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, and their followers among the shestidesiatniki.
Based no doubt on his own experience as a youth, when Pavlov many years later devised a course of self-study for nonspecialists, he highly recommended readings by “this brilliant mind,” who possessed the rare ability to explain his science in a manner that was accessible to nonspecialists while preserving its scientific character and depth. Bernard’s lectures, with their “lively descriptions of biological experiments, the force and compelling clarity of his thought, and the charm of his investigative intellect,” Pavlov confided, attracted him as a youth and provided the “original inspiration of my physiological activity.”32 So the young seminarian imbibed Pisarev’s scientism and mechanical materialism; Smiles’s view of virtue, self-discipline, and the life well lived; Sechenov’s general vision of a physiology of human nature and human ideals; and Bernard’s notion of an experimental, scientific approach to life. These favorite authors—and the secular alternatives to religious certainties that they proposed—would always remain fundamental to his worldview.
* * *
On April 4, 1866, in St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden, Dmitrii Karakozov fired a shot at Tsar Alexander II that energized critics of reform and put an end to “the sixties.” The shaken tsar lost confidence in his bond with the people and withdrew to a more distant, managerial role in governance. Conservatives portrayed the assassination attempt as the bitter fruit of declining morality and the propagation of pernicious ideas during the Reform Era. Reactionary Dmitrii Tolstoy was appointed Minister of Popular Enlightenment, signaling the advent of a new era in which ascendant conservatives slowed reform in some spheres and reversed it in others. Science continued to enjoy special status, but Contemporary and Russian Word were soon suppressed.
Riazan’s parishioners gathered at the city’s Central Cathedral on April 20 to thank God for sparing the tsar. Thousands of simple folk surrounded the church despite stormy weather and a biting wind while Archpriest Irinarkh conducted the service inside for high-ranking military and civilian figures. Food was then provided for the folk on the central square and for higher ranks at the town hall. The evening ended with three plays by the city’s new theater company and the singing of “God Save the Tsar.”
The seminary held its own ceremony three days later. The message from Riazan’s pulpit, like those delivered throughout Russia, combined thanksgiving with determination to reverse the decline of morality behind Karakozov’s wicked act: “We are enduring a terrible period of lack of faith and decline in religious convictions. If the politician must see in the evil attempt of the beast Karakazov upon the precious life of the great Tsar the extreme weakness of healthy political views and convictions, then the servant of Christ’s altar must see in this shameful act for all our century the extreme insufficiency of Christian conceptions and sacred religious convictions.” This sentiment no doubt contributed to the unwillingness of seminary authorities to allow their new specialist-teachers to use ideologically questionable texts by Bain, Lewes, and Wundt, and also led them to examine anew and find wanting the “moral state” of their students, whom they resolved to monitor more closely by enlisting clergy to report on their behavior around town.33
Ivan had fully embraced the very ideas now under sharp attack by seminary, church, and his ideologically orthodox father. A fervent believer in Pisarev’s program and an atheist, he would for decades see the battle against religion as an emblem of modern rationality. The priesthood was out; he had decided to study science at St. Petersburg University.
That decision led to explosive confrontations with his father—“heated arguments,” Ivan later recalled, “in which I went too far and that ended in quite serious quarrels.” The confrontation between a devout father accustomed to obedience and his equally strong-willed eldest son—determined to go his own way and self-righteous about the path he had chosen—permanently damaged their relationship. Ivan’s mother would visit him frequently over the next few years, but he would see his father only when absolutely necessary during very rare and brief trips to Riazan—and even then their quarrels would continue.
Petr Dmitrievich was at this same time reeling from a severe blow to his career. A year of strained relations with his new archbishop culminated in fall 1868 with the archbishop forcing him out of his comfortable position at the well-attended Nikolo-Vysokovskaia Church and consigning him to the sparsely attended and much less lucrative church at Riazan’s outskirts in Lazarev Cemetery.34
In September 1869, at age twenty, Ivan officially left the seminary. The new rules governing ecclesiastical education allowed students to skip the final year, which was devoted entirely to preparing for clerical practice, and still graduate in good standing. Bystrov and Chel’tsov joined him in doing so. His final overall grades were quite good, but no longer outstanding. If seminary pedagogues lamented losing a young man of distinctive talent, they kept it to themselves. They rated his behavior “excellent” and his application “zealously dedicated”—but his native abilities a mere “very good.”35
He spent the next year preparing for matriculation exams at St. Petersburg University. His family had moved to their new home, but he remained in the house on Nikol’skaia Street with Bystrov and Chel’tsov, overseeing the property while his father arranged for a caretaker and trying to earn some money for his upcoming adventure. The former seminarian would become a thinking proletarian, a practitioner of the modern creed.