In August 1870 Ivan Pavlov, probably accompanied by his friends Bystrov and Chel’tsov, arrived by rail at St. Petersburg’s Nikolaevskii Station and stepped into the city that would be his home for more than sixty-five years.
Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, the tsar’s “Window on Europe” had developed—initially by force and fiat—on the archipelago formed by the meandering of the Neva River through the inclement marshland at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. With a population of about 670,000, St. Petersburg was Europe’s third-largest city after London and Paris, the locus of a gathering industrial revolution, the capital of the Russian Empire, and home to the tsar, his court, and the state chancelleries. This fabled home of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevskii, and Pisarev was, for Pavlov, the sparkling center of Russian science.
As he entered the capital from the southeast on the train from Moscow and then walked to his destination along the city’s main avenue, the new arrival traveled from the new to the old, from the parts of the city most shaped by the dynamics of the post-Reform era to the heart of aristocratic Petersburg.
Through the windows of his rail car he saw the factories that now ringed the metropolis and spewed a smoky pall over the wooden workers’ tenements that were expanding around them. St. Petersburg was the industrial center of Russia, the site of increasingly large factories engaged in cotton spinning and tanning, metal processing and machine production. The tracks upon which Pavlov traveled were just the beginning of a network that would grow rapidly over the next decades and culminate in the Trans-Siberian Railway. State orders for rails, rolling stock, and military hardware fueled the growth of massive metallurgical and machine factories such as those created by Ludwig Nobel and Nikolai Putilov. As Pavlov’s train chugged through the city’s outlying districts, it crossed the railroad that Putilov was building to integrate his industrial empire with outlying factories, the city’s docks, and the railways leading to Moscow and Warsaw.
Three months earlier, workers at the great Nevskii cotton-spinning factory (just northeast of Nikolaevskii Station) had rocked the city with the country’s first major strike, marking a new era in the history of St. Petersburg factory labor. Other strikes would follow shortly, disillusioning thinkers on both the monarchist right and the populist left who believed that the peasants laboring in the city’s factories did not constitute a real urban proletariat and that Russia would develop along its own unique historical path without the economic and political nightmares associated with Western industrial capitalism.
Exiting Nikolaevskii Station, Pavlov did not yet see the striking face of the imperial city. Across the street was Znamenskaia Square, adorned by a great church and planned by the eminent architect Konstantin Thon. But the architect’s vision had been obscured by spontaneous developments spawned by the constant stream of new arrivals and the railroad’s impetus to commerce. The square was populated by traders and prostitutes, and surrounded by modest one- and two-story buildings, many of them boardinghouses. Walking a few steps, he passed under the eyes of costumed guards and crossed a bridge over a dirty rivulet, the Ligovka, before reaching the broad sidewalk of St. Petersburg’s central artery, Nevskii Prospekt. Gas lanterns mounted on bulky cast-iron foundations lined the avenue, which offered seemingly wall-to-wall bakeries. As he headed west toward the center, the buildings increased gradually in grandeur and interest. Mounting the stone Anichkov Bridge, he crossed the Fontanka River to imperial Petersburg, a city of palaces, chancelleries, shops, churches, theaters, restaurants, cafés, and—everywhere—water coursing through canals and riverbeds. A broad wooden sidewalk took him past the Belosel’skikh-Belozerskikh and Anichkov palaces to the Alexandrinskii Theater, renowned venue for the works of Pushkin and Turgenev. He passed the great public library (former haunt of both his childhood favorite Krylov and his current hero Pisarev) and arrived at the Petrine-era trading palace of Gostinyi Dvor, where vendors hawked bread, cookies, caviar, and tripe. A few steps farther was the City Duma, site of public lectures by leading intellectuals during the heady days of the early 1860s, and the musical center, the Engel’gardt House, where Glinka was now in vogue. Here he was surrounded by churches—some simple, others imposing: the Armenian Church, Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral, the Catholic Church of St. Catherine, the Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and—its great cupola visible in the distance—St. Isaac’s Cathedral. The street was full of deliverymen, mailmen, clerks, bureaucrats, and military uniforms (soldiers and officers composed about one-fifth of the population). The nobility also strolled on Nevskii—but they were fewer in August, since during the summer they followed the tsar out of town. Some passersby were smoking, a privilege first permitted on Nevskii only in the 1860s. Horse-drawn carriages of various shapes and sizes clattered past, some for public use and others bearing their gentry and merchant owners.
As an avid reader, Pavlov must have noticed the offices of familiar publishers and gazed hungrily at the ubiquitous bookstores, some of them specializing in German and French publications. The Passazh arcade housed Russia’s first fine shop of scientific objects—galvanometers, kymographs, respiratory apparatuses, chemical retorts, and other tools of the experimental age. He passed art exhibits and bakeries, the clubs of aristocrats, merchants, and literati, and, if he continued on Nevskii as far as the Police Bridge over the Moika canal, he arrived at the Wolf and Beranger Café, where Pushkin had conferred with his second before his fatal duel of 1837, and where Petersburg’s intelligentsia had long sipped tea and shared ideas.
At some point, he departed Nevskii Prospekt for a short stroll to the embankment of the Neva River. A likely path took him down Bol’shaia Morskaia (Great Sea) Street and under a grand arch to the very center of tsarist power, Palace Square. The square was enveloped on its near side by a massive three-story yellow semicircular building that housed the headquarters of the Military General Staff and, united with it by a great arch, the ministries of finance and foreign affairs. From the center of the square rose the Column of Victory commemorating the triumph of Tsar Alexander I over Napoleon; on its far side loomed the tsar’s magnificent residence, the Winter Palace.
Just beyond the palace flowed the majestic Neva River, which he crossed on the pontoons of Palace Bridge. Pausing midway, he could see, back to his left, on the bank he had just departed, the Admiralty, birthplace and home of Russia’s navy; the Senate and Holy Synod; and the evocative statue of Peter the Great immortalized by Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman. Ahead to his right, on the Petersburg Island, was the city’s oldest building, the Peter and Paul Fortress, within which a cathedral preserved the tombs of the imperial family and a high-security prison confined tsarism’s most dangerous enemies. Here Pisarev, incarcerated for four years, had written the essays that helped bring him to this place. Straight ahead was his destination—Vasilevskii Island, its embankment dominated by three striking buildings that embodied Peter the Great’s efforts to will Russian science into existence: the Kunstkamera, which held the natural historical collection he had mandated; the august Academy of Sciences, which he had originally staffed with foreign recruits; and the red three-storied Twelve Collegia that now housed St. Petersburg University.1
To enter the citadel and begin his studies of natural science, Pavlov first had to assure university authorities of his honorable intentions and implement two ruses. He submitted to the rector a sheaf of official papers: the record of his lawful birth and baptism, a letter from the seminary’s inspector of students that assured authorities at a university rocked by student demonstrations in the 1860s that he was not a troublemaker, and a copy of his father’s formuliarnyi spisok. This was the omnipresent, meticulously updated record maintained by the tsarist bureaucracy, and it detailed Petr Dmitrievich’s loyal service, even assessing the “behavior” of every member of his family: “very good” for father, mother, and eldest son; merely “good” for younger sons Dmitrii and Petr.
He also submitted a letter of dubious honesty from archpriest Kharlampii Romanskii certifying that Pavlov’s father could not afford to pay tuition. Owning a home too “distant from the center of the city” to attract constant boarders and “having meager means to support his family, the priest Pavlov cannot pay St. Petersburg University.” That was untrue. Despite the serious setback of his transfer to Lazarev Cemetery Church, he remained more than capable of paying the university fee of twenty-five rubles per semester. Yet he was unwilling to do so—still furious at his son’s decision to leave the priesthood and still smarting from their fierce confrontations. The university waived Pavlov’s fees and offered him a small grant of twenty rubles.
He rented a small, inexpensive, uncomfortable room in a boardinghouse near the university and scratched out an existence by sharing resources with Bystrov and Chel’tsov, by obtaining occasional small grants from the University and the Mutual Aid Society of Needy Students, and by eating at the cheap dining halls that had sprung up in the city over the previous decade. In these kukhmisterskie a two-course meal cost fifteen or twenty kopecks, bread and salt sat freely available on the table, and the quality of the fare was so risky that students referred to them colloquially as kataral’nye (catarrh places).
Pavlov’s second ruse—common among seminarians—was designed to avoid a potentially troublesome entrance exam. The university’s four faculties—Physico-Mathematical, Juridical, Historical-Philological, and Eastern Languages—had differing admissions requirements. Explaining that he had received a “general education” at the seminary, he requested admission to the Juridical faculty. He did not, of course, have any intention to study law. Rather, he was avoiding the math exam required for acceptance to the Physico-Mathematical division in which the natural sciences resided. Passing the Juridical entrance exams on Russian literature with the highest grade of 5, and on history with a 4, he explained ten days later to the rector that, “having decided to study the natural sciences,” he requested transfer to the Physico-Mathematical Faculty. That request was quickly granted.2
The Physico-Mathematical division was the university’s largest, with eleven full professors, five assistant professors, two lecturers, and a few temporary appointees and lab assistants. Within it were sixteen subdivisions—Ivan’s choice was Anatomy of Man and Physiology of Animals.
The course of study was rigorous and the schedule packed. Students attended lectures Monday through Saturday, usually from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, and also pursued “practical activities” in several subjects. Pavlov’s schedule during his first year consisted of lecture courses on general zoology, general botany, human anatomy, general anatomy, inorganic chemistry, physics, agronomy, and Eastern Orthodox theology, with additional practical exercises in botany, inorganic chemistry, and agronomy. During his second year, he attended lectures on general animal physiology, organic chemistry, animal anatomy, agronomy, physics, plant anatomy and physiology, analytical chemistry, and physical geography, with additional practical work in most of these courses. The third- and fourth-year curriculum emphasized more specialized studies and practical work. During these years, he would concentrate on animal physiology, with a secondary emphasis on chemistry.
“The faculty at this time was in a brilliant state,” he later recalled. “We had a series of professors with enormous scientific authority and outstanding talent as lecturers.”3 The science faculty was indeed dazzling. The lecturer to Pavlov’s freshman class on inorganic chemistry was Dmitrii Mendeleev, who had created his periodic table of the elements a year earlier as a teaching aid for this very course and who was in the process of developing his periodic law. Pavlov’s second-year lecturer on organic chemistry would be another eminent scientist, Alexander Butlerov.
Three other important professors lectured on the biological sciences during his first year. The professor of zoology (and rector of the university) was Karl Kessler, who had just been unanimously elected president of the newly created St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists. An ichthyologist, Kessler was among Russia’s many pre-Darwinian evolutionists and would be one of the leading figures in developing a distinctive style of Russian evolutionism that accepted Darwin’s principle of natural selection but rejected his Malthusian emphasis on overpopulation and intraspecific struggle. He shared this view with professor of botany (and dean of the Physico-Mathematics Faculty) Andrei Beketov, who was well on his way to the scientific, organizational, and pedagogical achievements that would earn him his contemporaries’ acclaim as the “Father of Russian Botany.” Aside from his scholarly contributions, Beketov was a widely read popularizer of science who had translated and edited such leading works of Western biology as T. H. Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. A socialist in his youth, he was by the 1870s a kindly liberal engaged in constant bureaucratic conflict with the authorities on behalf of students, science education, and university autonomy.4
Perhaps Pavlov most looked forward to the first-year lecturer on general human anatomy. Filipp Ovsiannikov’s scientific achievements were lauded by scientists, officialdom, and shestidesiatniki alike. He had trained with leading European specialists and enjoyed ongoing relationships with the famous physiologists of his day, including Carl Ludwig, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and Claude Bernard. He combined histological and physiological methods in his investigations of the role of the nervous system in regulating such bodily functions as circulation and respiration. Shortly after Pavlov’s arrival in St. Petersburg, Ovsiannikov announced his discovery of a nervous center in the brain stem that controlled blood pressure by regulating the veins—a contribution to understanding the functioning of the animal machine that became a staple of textbooks in Russia and abroad. Ovsiannikov was also a full member of the Academy of Sciences—and so was officially Russia’s leading physiologist—and had founded physiological labs at both the Academy and the university. Pavlov had certainly read about him while still a seminarian, as the academician’s research had been cited in Lewes’s Physiology of Common Life and lauded by Pisarev as a rare example of Russian scientific achievement.
The importance of “practical studies” in the curriculum—which proved fateful for Pavlov’s choice of mentor—reflected a confluence of interests between the science faculty and tsarist officials intent on minimizing students’ political activity. In the 1860s, such shestidesiatniki as Chernyshevskii and Pisarev touted science as a means to undermine tsarist ideology and build a modern worldview. Many conservative intellectuals believed, however, that real, sober science, as opposed to the polemics and half-knowledge of tendentious dilettantes, posed no problem. True scientists understood the difficulties of obtaining real knowledge and the great distance between, say, measuring the blood pressure of a frog and pronouncing on free will, the nature of the soul, and other great issues of the day. For this reason, the tsarist censor had not suppressed Sechenov’s Reflexes of the Brain, but rather sought to limit its distribution to a presumably discerning “sober scientific audience,” just as it often permitted the publication of original scientific works while suppressing shorter, popularized summaries of them.
In that same spirit, by the end of the 1860s influential tsarist ministers had come to see intensive practical studies of science as a way to combat student radicalism. Time spent in the lab or field on focused scientific projects would help turn students into careful thinkers, engage them cooperatively with faculty, and simply keep them busy. In June 1869, Minister of Popular Enlightenment Ivan Delianov informed the supervisor of the St. Petersburg Scholarly Division that the Ministry’s Commission on Student Disorders had decided that one effective measure would be to “attract [students] to serious scientific studies.” Perhaps, Delianov suggested, practical scientific work should be required of all students.
The dean of the Physico-Mathematical Division, Beketov, responded shrewdly. Sidestepping the political content of Delianov’s letter, he explained that the science faculty agreed that practical activities were critical to effective instruction but had been thwarted by lack of funds. Professors needed adequate lab facilities and were in any case unable themselves to supervise all student exercises and research. For that, they needed additional faculty as well as dissectors and lab assistants.
Listing the facilities and personnel in each science that would be required to implement Delianov’s edict, Beketov noted, for example, that in 1869 there were no practical activities in physiology because a single professor, Ovsiannikov, was responsible for anatomy, histology, and physiology—and lacked even the aid of a dissector. “Complete success” in teaching these sciences required a separate professor for each, as in western Europe, and an independent department of physiology with a much-improved lab and added personnel.5
In the years since his appointment in 1863, Ovsiannikov had created a small physiology lab at the university, and in 1867–1868 he managed to hire two European-trained lab assistants and privatdozents, both specialists on the nervous system—Nikolai Bakst and Il’ia Tsion. Now, “to expand teaching of physiology, anatomy and histology and to increase the practical activities of students in these sciences,” he proposed that Tsion be promoted to adjunct assistant professor. The university’s faculty council enthusiastically endorsed this step toward acquiring a second permanent professorship in physiology, anatomy, and histology.
Tsion was a talented experimenter and lecturer who had already acquired a “European reputation” for his scientific research. Writing to the bureaucrat who oversaw university appointments, rector Karl Kessler noted that he had already produced many significant works, had been awarded two science prizes from the French Academy of Sciences, and “works so successfully with students that, under his guidance, several of them have produced very serious investigations.” Tsion had but one defect: he was Jewish. Yet Kessler hastened to point out that the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment recognized “difficulties only in the appointment of Jews for the teaching of juridical, political, and historical sciences.”6 A Jewish scientist was unlikely to subvert the Orthodox faith or other Russian values.
Pavlov’s first year at the university was also Tsion’s first as adjunct professor, in which capacity he lectured on general anatomy to the entering class. And it would be Tsion—not Ovsiannikov or any of the university’s famous faculty members—who became Pavlov’s adored mentor, inspiring him with his lectures, surgical skills, and experimental prowess; introducing him to the joys of scientific research, and infusing his university years with the tragic drama of his own meteoric rise and fall.
* * *
For Pavlov and his fellow ex-seminarians from Riazan, the first year in St. Petersburg proved extremely difficult. They succumbed one by one to the pressures of life in the intimidating big city as they scratched out an existence from kopeck to kopeck and confronted the challenging university curriculum. “Psychiatry,” as Pavlov later put it, thus “captured my interest at the very beginning of my Petersburg life.”
Decades later, he recounted on several occasions the different ways in which Bystrov and Chel’tsov had temporarily “become mentally ill.” Bystrov, he explained, became melancholy and suicidal when the intellectual style that had made him a star student in seminary failed utterly in his science studies: “This was inevitably accompanied by an unpleasant, dark mood. As such failures were constantly repeated, these dark moods accumulated and finally ended in a deep melancholy that continued for many months (as much as a half year) and led to numerous determined attempts at suicide.” When Bystrov’s friends “convinced him that the natural sciences did not suit his cast of mind, and almost forcibly took him to the lectures in the Juridical Faculty,” he conquered his illness and “lived his entire remaining life strong and healthy.”
At about the same time as Bystrov’s depression—toward the end of their freshman year—Chel’tsov also suffered a mental illness, “going out of his mind for several days.” Pavlov first realized that something was wrong when his friend repeatedly woke him up one night and “I see that he is collecting various things—books, some other stuff, a ruble note—and is burning them and asking me to watch.”
Pavlov and Bystrov took him to a physician, where, seated in the reception room, Chel’tsov began hallucinating. His friends took him to the train station and urged him to go home, but Chel’tsov later returned to their apartment and engaged Pavlov in conversation—sometimes lucid, sometimes talking nonsense. He confided that in the physician’s reception room he had seen devils flying around him and had conducted experiments upon them, for example, by testing their reactions to sketches of a cross (an interesting hallucination for an ex-seminarian who had abandoned the priesthood for chemistry). Judging from Pavlov’s account, Chel’tsov passed in and out of this state for several days. (Discussing this episode in later years, Pavlov and his advisors on psychiatry speculated that he was suffering from either “banal schizophrenia” or “hysterical simulation.”)
Shortly thereafter, in April 1871, Pavlov was himself diagnosed by Dr. Uspenskii of the Medical-Surgical Academy with “disturbance of the nerves (neurosismus),” a common diagnosis when the patient exhibited loss of energy and brainpower without apparent organic damage. He was in such a bad state that he left St. Petersburg for Riazan in mid-May—before the end of the semester and without taking the exams for promotion to the second year.7
Life then took a decisive turn for the better. After recuperating in Riazan over the summer he returned to St. Petersburg in mid-August with his younger brother Dmitrii, who was soon working closely with Mendeleev. The more sociable and worldly Dmitrii picked up where he had left off in Riazan—sewing his brother’s shirts, finding places to live and eat, and organizing his social life. Their mother occasionally came to town for extended stays.
Nurtured by his younger brother, Ivan performed well on his exams for promotion to the second year, receiving a 5 from Mendeleev in inorganic chemistry and a 4 from Beketov in botany. He was awarded a university stipend for his sophomore year and a larger imperial stipend subsequently. His grades were all 4s and 5s, placing him in a three-way tie for eighth among the twenty-five fourth-year students studying the natural sciences. He was not, however, much concerned with earning straight 5s. He was already a specialist, his imagination and energies captured by practical studies and original research with Tsion.8
The Pavlov brothers (joined by Petr in August 1873) became the nucleus of a typically intense student circle. Aside from Bystrov and Chel’tsov, it expanded to include fellow Riazan native Nikolai Terskii, fellow provincial ex-seminarian Iakov Stol’nikov, Egor Vagner, and a certain Goncharov. Their interests and inclinations ranged from Platonic philosophy to science to revolutionary politics, and, as Pavlov recalled a few years later, their intense discussions touched upon “issues from all possible sciences, philosophical questions about God, the soul, and so forth; about every fact of life ... All this was to be—and we actually attempted this—collected into a certain system ... I remember clearly how such a general view was a living, burning necessity. We considered people without such a general view pathetic. We could not understand how one could live without a general view of the world and life.”9
Pavlov’s future wife encountered this close-knit group only some years later, but gathered the following: “They included 6–7 people, who always shared among themselves books and discussions of everything that they read and that occurred in life. Of them, I. P. [Ivan Petrovich; i.e., Pavlov] was the best read, and also the most heated and inexhaustible disputant; he was very resourceful and never at a loss for words. Possessing a brilliant memory, he could cite from memory entire pages from Pisarev’s articles, from his favorite book, Lewes’s Physiology of Common Life, and from Smiles’s Self-Help.... He had an unusually rich imagination and delighted in proposing new theories and views on various scientific questions, which did not prevent him from eventually recanting these views in his friends’ presence if they proved unfounded.”10 Six members of this circle, including all three Pavlovs, would become scientists.
Even as Pavlov cited Pisarev and debated various all-encompassing worldviews, his attitude toward such discussions was changing under the influence of specialized scientific studies and his mentor, who proved very different from the shestidesiatniki’s image of the progressive scientist that had inspired him in Riazan.
This mentor, who initiated Pavlov into the pleasures of what he would soon term “the mature mind,” was St. Petersburg University’s new adjunct assistant professor of physiology, Il’ia Fadeevich Tsion (known in the West as Elias von Cyon or Élie de Cyon). The dynamic young professor created an “enormous impression upon all of us [aspiring] physiologists,” Pavlov later recalled. “We were simply astounded by his masterful, simple presentation of the most complex physiological questions and his truly artistic ability to perform experiments.” In a letter written decades after their work together, he reminisced warmly that “for me, your lectures in the special course at the university and work in your laboratory are among the best memories of my youth.”11
Only six or seven years older than Pavlov, Tsion was already renowned for his scientific contributions, having collaborated in the 1860s with both Bernard and Ludwig on studies of the role of the nervous system in the self-regulation of physiological processes. By age thirty he had earned doctorates in both Russia and the West and had produced some thirty works in four languages (Latin, German, French, and Russian).
In one renowned contribution to the physiology of self-regulation, he demonstrated the reflex action by which the depressor branch of the vagus nerve (“Cyon’s nerve”) lowered the blood pressure by dilating the vessels. Collaborating with Bernard, he also discovered nerves that accelerated cardiac activity. The French physiologist was so impressed by the young Russian that he sponsored Tsion’s successful candidacy for the French Academy of Science’s first Montyon Prize for original research.
Trained and highly praised by Western Europe’s leading physiologists, Tsion was perfectly positioned for appointment to St. Petersburg University’s expanding department of anatomy and physiology. When Sechenov resigned his professorship in physiology at St. Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy—the country’s leading medical school and center of scientific medicine—Tsion also acquired that position.12
He was, then, the very model of the modern experimental physiologist, a figure straight from Pavlov’s dreams as a seminarian in Riazan—except for his militantly conservative political views. A confirmed monarchist, he was a member of the circles around leading official ideologists Mikhail Katkov and Konstantin Pobedonostsev. They valued him especially, in Katkov’s words, as “a strong opponent of the materialist orientation” who rendered valuable service by combating materialism in that science, physiology, in which it had especially “penetrated minds and acquired strength.” For his admirers, Tsion “combined the gifts of a brilliant pedagogue, thinker, and experimentalist with the grand temperament of a political activist.” For his detractors, he was the amoral tool of reactionary officialdom. In any case, he devoted himself to overthrowing the very image of science in general, and physiology in particular, that his predecessor, Sechenov, had embodied—and that, through the writings of Pisarev and other shestidesiatniki, had attracted Pavlov to the university.13
Tsion also antagonized many colleagues and students by marrying the daughter of a wealthy contractor and living a life of ostentatious luxury. Again in contrast to Sechenov—a popular lecturer who was beloved for his gentle, kindly manner and ascetic lifestyle—Tsion acquired the reputation of a brusque and aggressive social climber with questionable morality and a taste for fine living. Nor did his frequent disparaging comments about Sechenov endear him to students and faculty. Zoologist Il’ia Mechnikov observed that “Many who came to know him—myself included—disliked him very much for his malicious character and inability to take any morally elevated point of view.” He was “selfish, jealous, proud, independent and ambitious” in the words of one sympathetic biographer.14
He was also an outstanding experimentalist and inspiring teacher. Pavlov first heard Tsion lecture during his freshman course on general anatomy, but it was probably during his sophomore year that the two began working closely together. Ovsiannikov taught the second-year course on physiology, but the academician’s dull lectures included few experimental demonstrations. Tsion supplemented Ovsiannikov’s course with practical exercises in the university’s physiology lab during the evenings. These lessons in experimental technique continued during Tsion’s third-year course, Exercises in Physiology, and his special course on physiology during Pavlov’s fourth year. In that last course, to which Pavlov later referred as “among the best memories of my youth,” Tsion lectured on nervous control of various organ systems and supervised Pavlov’s first original research, presiding over his young charge’s discovery of a lifelong passion. Pavlov also apparently attended Tsion’s lecture course on physiology in 1873–1874 across town at the Medical-Surgical Academy.15
Reminiscing later about Tsion, Pavlov emphasized his brilliance as a lecturer, his inspirational qualities in the lab—where he directed students and staff “not by strict measures but simply through his own attitude toward the work”—and his stunning surgical prowess. Tsion hated clumsy, unnecessarily bloody surgery, a quality that Pavlov liked to illustrate with an anecdote that also cast his teacher’s high-society lifestyle in a flattering light: On his way to a ball, Tsion arrived at the lab dressed in coat, top hat, and white gloves. Pointedly declining to change his garb, he quickly and precisely performed a complex operation on the abdominal cavity of the experimental animal and was soon on his way—his costume still in pristine condition. When master of his own lab, Pavlov, too, would inspire by example, express a hatred of sloppiness and bloody operations, and impress coworkers with his surgical prowess.16
As lecturer and supervisor, Tsion provided Pavlov’s first systematic view of physiology—an approach to the study of animals’ life processes that would underlie his protégé’s lifelong scientific vision and style. He propounded an approach that synthesized what he considered the best elements of two Western European traditions: the “anatomical-vivisectional” orientation that had reached its apogee with Bernard and the “purely physical” orientation associated with Ludwig and German physiology. Tsion’s synthesis, which he termed the “physico-vivisectional” approach, was basically an updated Bernardianism enriched by the perspectives and precision-oriented techniques associated with German physiology.
According to Tsion, practitioners of the anatomical-vivisectional orientation had investigated the operations of animal organs through anatomical studies and vivisection—both of which retained a largely observational rather than truly experimental character. These scientists had produced a wealth of factual material, but their explanations of physiological phenomena often rested upon the empty notion of “life force.”17
Proponents of the purely physical orientation, on the other hand, had attempted to explain physiological phenomena in terms of the same physical and chemical processes that governed the inorganic realm. These scientists had freed physiology from the unscientific notion of vital forces, but their explanations, too, proved unsatisfactory. According to Tsion, this orientation proved inapplicable to a number of complex life processes that “are conditioned by the joint action of so many varied forces that it is often completely impossible to reduce these processes to the comparatively simple laws that lie at their foundation.” Physiological processes could not violate physical and chemical laws, but, as Bernard had insisted, neither could they be explained reductively as the simple product of those laws. Physiology demanded its own special methodology and forms of explanation appropriate to the specific functions that it investigated.18
The failure of purely physical models and the progress of physiological methodology had given rise to the “physico-vivisectionist” orientation with which Tsion associated himself. Practitioners of this orientation rejected the doctrine of vital forces and so preserved their science’s “strictly scientific spirit.” They employed chemistry and physics in their approach to biological phenomena, but rejected the view that physiology was merely the application of physics and chemistry to the organic world, and regarded “more attentively the particularities that characterize biological phenomena.”19
Tsion emphasized the key role of methodological developments in this recent turn and in the progress of physiology in general. Vivisection was being transformed into an effective tool for experimentation as the rapid improvement of technique allowed physiologists to study in isolation the functions of individual organs. (Pavlov’s later term for this would be “physiological surgery.”) Furthermore (and here Tsion drew primarily upon the achievements of Étienne-Jules Marey and German physiology), by borrowing techniques developed in physics, physiologists could observe experimental phenomena more accurately. A host of modern apparatuses enhanced observation by producing graphic representations of physiological processes and their relationships. Curves inscribed on graph paper constituted a “universal language comprehensible to all peoples” and represented accurately both objects of investigations and their dynamics.20
These developments underlined an important truth about physiology: because this science dealt with the most complex phenomena in nature—life processes—its progress depended primarily not on theory and philosophy but on methodological advances. As Pavlov would later put it: “For the naturalist, everything is in the method, in the chances of attaining a steadfast, lasting truth.”21
Following Bernard, Tsion taught Pavlov to focus upon the investigation of organs, for here the physiologist grappled with the vital phenomena that distinguished living organisms and so constituted the special subject of his discipline. The “purely physical” world served as a source of heuristically useful models—for example, the model of heart as pump—but the physiologist always bore in mind their inevitable limitations. Also like Bernard, Tsion taught that the scientist must embrace determinism while avoiding philosophical commitments to either materialism or idealism. The scientist was constantly peeling back the layers of the organism’s life processes—identifying experimentally the fully determined proximate causes of first one phenomenon, then the phenomenon preceding it, then the one preceding that, without ever speculating about ultimate causes or the nature of life itself. Philosophers, theologians, and laypeople could be materialists or idealists, but within the lab the professional physiologist avoided such issues. Pavlov would, in this spirit, insist throughout his life that: “I am not a materialist, but rather a naturalist who investigates life by the method that best leads to the achievement of true knowledge.”22
Tsion accompanied his lectures with experimental demonstrations prepared in the new physiology lab at the Military-Medical Academy’s Anatomical-Physiological Institute. Unlike Sechenov, he operated enthusiastically upon warm-blooded animals. By Tsion’s design, the lab included two rooms equipped for vivisection, a third with apparatus for the analysis of blood, a fourth for chemical analysis, and special facilities for research on electrophysiology and the sensory organs; he also acquired such modern technologies as Ludwig’s kymograph and Marey’s sphygmograph, cardiograph, myograph, and polygraph. His pedagogical attention to the use of these technologies is clear in his two-volume guide to laboratory physiology, which his protégé would, even forty years later, pronounce the best primer of its kind, together with Bernard’s Leçons de physiologie opératoire.23
Pavlov joined a group of other young aspiring physiologists in Tsion’s lab and developed there a passion for intricate experimental work, an appreciation of the role of methodology and technique in science, and the surgical skills necessary to Tsion’s brand of experimental physiology. By January 1874 he was hooked on research and determined not to allow the course requirements for his upcoming graduation in May to interfere with it, so he petitioned the dean for another year on an imperial stipend. Extraneous course requirements, he explained, had left him only the fourth year to “more or less fundamentally familiarize myself, both theoretically and practically, with the subjects of my specialty.” The dean refused Pavlov an additional year of his stipend, but permitted him to postpone his final examinations until the following year.
Granted this breathing space, he plunged into three original research projects, which yielded his first successes as a practicing physiologist. In each he collaborated with another student to extend Tsion’s investigations of the nervous system’s role in regulating organ systems.
Shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, in October 1874, he and Vladimir Velikii delivered two joint reports to the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists that deepened Tsion’s findings on nervous control of the circulatory system. For Tsion, the heart responded both to its own rhythms and to signals from the central nervous system that regulated cardiac activity in accordance with changing conditions. When the organism was active, signals from the sympathetic nerves increased blood flow and accelerated cardiac activity; when it was at rest, the parasympathetic (vagus) nerves signaled the heart to contract less frequently and strenuously. In “On the Influence of the Laryngeal Nerves upon Blood Circulation,” the pair confirmed Tsion’s view that the sympathetic nerves accelerating the heartbeat passed from the spine across the stellate ganglion. In “On the Centripetal Accelerations of the Heartbeat,” they announced their discovery of nerves in the chest of a dog that, when excited, increased the strength of cardiac contractions. This discovery of an antagonist to “Cyon’s nerve” (the depressor branch of the vagus nerve, stimulation of which lowered the blood pressure by dilating the vessels) elaborated Tsion’s picture of complex nervous mechanisms regulating blood flow in accordance with the organism’s needs. Pavlov’s third project was his entry, in collaboration with Mikhail Afanas’ev, in the university’s prize competition in physiology on a theme suggested by Tsion, “On the Nerves Governing the Work of the Pancreatic Gland.” This first encounter with a notoriously difficult gland engaged him in a fundamental issue that became a lifetime preoccupation: the quest for and definition of “normalcy” in physiological experiments that inevitably, to one degree or another, distorted the very processes that they were conducted to reveal. Earlier investigators such as Claude Bernard, Rudolf Heidenhain, and N. O. Bernstein agreed that the normal functioning of the extremely sensitive pancreas was distorted by both the temporary and permanent fistulas that physiologists implanted to draw out and measure the gland’s secretory response to various stimuli. Those European physiologists disagreed about which of the imperfect technologies was preferable and how, precisely, each distorted pancreatic secretion—and in their research, Afanas’ev and Pavlov also had to make and justify such judgments. They concluded that the permanent fistula was preferable, and that the distortions inherent to it did not render “abnormal” the central result they reported: their discovery in dogs of nerves that, when excited, expanded the vessels of the pancreas and so increased its rate of secretion. At a meeting of the Physico-Mathematical faculty in late January 1875, Ovsiannikov praised Pavlov’s and Afanas’ev’s research on this “extremely difficult” subject and convinced the faculty to award them the gold medal. Their article appeared in a celebratory volume issued by the university, and they subsequently reported their findings to the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists and in the prestigious Pflügers Archiv.24
As he rejoiced in his research, Pavlov’s plans were clear: After graduation, he would serve as Tsion’s lab assistant at the Medical-Surgical Academy while earning a medical degree there. Medical school and medical practice hardly appealed to him—he distrusted physicians and often referred to them disparagingly as practitioners of the “Latin cookbook”—but a medical degree was considered a prerequisite for a professorship in physiology.
By the time he formally received his gold medal in January 1875, however, these plans were evaporating. Four months later, when he graduated from the university with a candidate’s degree—awarded for completion of coursework and submission of his article on the pancreas, and entitling him to serve as a lab assistant—his goal seemed more distant still.25
By this time Pavlov was reeling from a most unlikely, disorienting, and traumatic series of events. As he later put it, the linchpin of his plans, “this most talented physiologist” Il’ia Tsion, was “chased out of the Academy.”26
Tsion’s problems had begun with his controversial appointment in 1872 to the professorship in physiology at the Military-Medical Academy. Sechenov had vacated that position in disgust when faculty factionalism prevented the appointment of zoologist Il’ia Mechnikov. Tsion then mobilized the same powerful credentials that had won him appointment at the university: an impressive collection of scientific works and prizes, and endorsements from Bernard (who pronounced Tsion one of the best physiologists in the world), du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, the Academy’s eminent professor and clinician Sergei Botkin, and Sechenov himself. The rival candidate, Kiev University professor A. S. Skliarevskii, had not only compiled an unexceptional record, but, as one of his supporters admitted, “not one of his ten works concerns physiology proper, so legally he doesn’t have the right to occupy this [physiological] department.”
Factionalism again enabled the clearly weaker candidate to prevail. The Academy’s faculty was bitterly divided into the so-called “Russian” and “German” groups, and, in a 15–11 vote, the former faction triumphed in a vote to offer the position to Skliarevskii. The majority report bristled with antipathy against Tsion, whom it accused of plagiarism, arrogance, and dishonesty. His scientific work was dismissed as the “illogical and superficial” results of “borrowing” the work of others, and as demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding of the essence of investigation,” “an inability to make observations,” and “ignorance” of both pathological anatomy and mathematics. His two European prizes were dismissed as the result of Bernard’s influence. “It is absolutely impossible,” the majority concluded, “to entrust the numerous youth crowding into the Academy to the scientific guidance of Mr. Tsion.”27
The Academy fell under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War (it would soon be renamed the “Military-Medical Academy”), so Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin had the authority to either confirm or overturn the faculty decision. Both factions sought to influence him, but apparently the decisive factor was a report from the Main Medical Inspector that documented Tsion’s superior scientific credentials. Pavlov later recalled that Miliutin himself wrote to Bernard, Brücke, Ludwig, and Michael Foster—“the four leading physiologists of that time”—to solicit their opinions; that only Ludwig had heard of Skliarevskii, and thought little of him; and that all four supplied “brilliant recommendations” of Tsion. Miliutin overturned the faculty majority and appointed Tsion, who assumed the professorship in July 1872.28
Whatever the merits of the case, Tsion thus became persona non grata to a powerful faction at the Academy and, beyond its walls, to those who valued democratic processes in the university and so resented his imposition by a tsarist bureaucrat.
Six months into his tenure, in January 1873, the new professor delivered the featured address at the Academy’s commencement ceremony. Entitled “The Heart and the Brain,” this deliberately provocative speech expressed the approach to physiology and the ideological view of science that Pavlov was learning from Tsion. And it provided another bit of tinder for the fire that would soon consume its author.
Tsion used his discussion of the relationship between heart and brain to develop a broader argument about the nature of physiology as illustrated by the real achievements and inherent limitations of scientific investigations of the relationship between body and mind. Referring elliptically to his predecessor, Sechenov, and to other heroes of the shestidesiatniki, he observed archly that “about no other science do there exist so many perverse views, so many false conceptions as about physiology.” Popular authors had incorrectly portrayed that discipline as the destroyer of hallowed moral ideals, but such nihilism was foreign to true science, which enhanced the health and wealth of humanity and, even more importantly, satisfied man’s aesthetic sense through the discovery of truths about the “wondrous harmony of natural phenomena.”29
Modern physiology, he observed, had confirmed the traditional poetic view of the relationship between the heart and emotions by demonstrating that the nervous connections between heart and brain rendered them an interactive unit. The heart was an organ of emotions, since its rate of contraction was influenced by emotional states, and since the nerves linking heart and brain informed the brain of the need to correct irregularities in the heartbeat. So the heart both reflected and, to some degree, controlled expressions of grief, happiness, and hatred. Indeed, because of “the involuntary nature of all changes in the heart and its vessels under the influence of emotional states, these are essentially the only true proof of the sincerity of our feelings.” Love, jealousy, fear, grief, joy, and anger each produced a distinctive strength and frequency of the pulse and heartbeat—and these could be displayed graphically by the sphygmograph and cardiograph.30
The physiology of the heart, then, offered several obvious social benefits: “In a crowd of inheritors surrounding the bed of a dying man, there are some under the influence of genuine grief; from the stimulation of the vagus nerves their hearts beat slowly and forcefully. There are others whose hearts, from impatient expectation, beat quickly and weakly, with the excitation of the accelerator nerves. The cardiograph could, in such instances, uncover the true feelings of all present and so be of help in the drawing up of the will.” Similarly, “The graphic representation of the cardiac contractions of the suitors of a young lady could easily uncover whose love came from the heart and whose came only from lust. The nature and degree of the love ... could thus be represented graphically. [This] ... would better defend the girl from the dangers of seduction than would any moral admonitions.” Such examples were hardly calculated to endear the speaker to a student body accustomed to talk about the democratic essence of science and the equality of women.31
Nor was Tsion’s vigorous critique of the naive belief that physiology could explain the secrets of the human psyche. The successes achieved through mechanistic approaches to organic phenomena had encouraged many physiologists and laypersons to imagine that science was on the brink of a materialist psychology, that it would reveal the secrets of the psyche by correlating the development and diseases of the brain with intellectual and emotional states. Yet “This resembles a child who, seeing at the horizon the apparent contact of the sky with the earth, imagines that he need only reach that point in order to climb up into the heavens.”32
Perhaps in the distant future physiologists might discover the mechanics of cerebral processes. But, as du Bois-Reymond had recently conceded in a much-publicized recantation of his earlier beliefs, even if these processes were described in terms of atoms and chemical properties, “we would remain no less distant from an understanding of the nature of consciousness and our means of thinking.” Science was limited to knowledge of phenomena, of mechanical processes—the human mind could never comprehend how these processes form thoughts.
For Tsion, this knowledge of its limits constituted science’s great strength. While disappointing to the layperson seeking easy answers to philosophical and political problems, it promised to end scientists’ fruitless pursuit of chimeras and direct their attention to the countless answerable questions whose solution was “the inexhaustible source of the greatest spiritual satisfaction for the scientists and ... of useful discoveries for mankind.”33
The circumstances of Tsion’s appointment, his truculent personality, anti-Semitism, and his aggressively conservative speech all provided the tinder—but the igniting spark proved to be the mundane issue of grades.
Grading at the Medical-Surgical Academy was generally lax, particularly in what students called the “theoretical sciences.” Although the Academy’s faculty and curriculum had been reformed in the spirit of “scientific medicine,” many of its students remained unconvinced that physiology, for example, was directly relevant to medical practice. Nor, at this time, was there much evidence to the contrary. The distance between lab and bedside remained great, and the notion of a science-based medicine remained a controversial vision—one that, for many general practitioners, devalued the experience and art of the physician.34 The physician’s armamentarium remained much the same—adjustment of diet and regimen, bloodletting, purging, and such medicinal plants as willow bark and foxglove —as it had before the great developments in nineteenth-century chemistry and physiology. Traditionally, then, a delegation of Academy students would approach their teacher of a “theoretical science” and request that the entire class be granted a 3—a “gentleman’s C,” in later North American parlance—rather than submit to an examination. Professors routinely agreed in order to avoid confrontation and the tedium of examining the class.
Tsion, however, refused, and at his first lecture of fall 1873 warned students to prepare for a final exam. He was probably motivated both by his conviction that students needed to take physiology more seriously and by a widespread sentiment among conservatives that instruction and exams at the Academy should be more rigorous. At least two other professors joined him in refusing to grant the 3; students responded with protests and threats of a boycott. Inspector of Students N. I. Kozlov backed the professors fully, warning that students who boycotted the exams would fail and so be compelled to repeat the second year.35
The students were confident that Tsion would back down, but he remained adamant. In spring 1874, some submitted halfheartedly to the exam and others boycotted it. One hundred thirty students failed. Student leaders responded defiantly. Tsion registered a formal complaint against two for their “insolence and insulting words.” Kozlov suspended one for three days and the other for seven, placing each under “strict observation.” In solidarity, many students demanded that they, too, be disciplined, but the end of the school year quieted the campus.36
Over the summer, however, the populist journal Fatherland Notes published a polemical three-part attack on Tsion as a mediocre plagiarist and political reactionary whose very appointment to the Academy had been illegitimate. Leading essayist Nikolai Mikhailovskii wrote the first two sections, detailing the circumstances of Tsion’s appointment (quoting the majority report at length) and excoriating Tsion’s “The Heart and the Brain” as a marriage of sloppy science and reactionary politics. The third, unsigned part of the article—which was generally attributed to Professor Sorokin of the Academy’s Russian faction—lacerated Tsion’s recently published lectures on physiology in the spirit of the original majority report.37
Tsion’s response was bitter, polemical, and politically inept. In an article published immediately in the official Military-Medical Journal he attacked the opponents of his appointment. The censor forbade him to distribute this article in pamphlet form because it was “personally insulting” to several faculty members. An acquaintance in the Ministry of Printed Affairs advised Tsion to circumvent censorship by expanding its length, which resulted in his Works and Critical Articles (1874), which featured five articles excoriating his critics as nihilists and nincompoops.
Student protesters appeared en masse at his first lecture of fall 1874, heckling him and pelting him with eggs and cucumbers. A leaflet put the issue this way: “Will we, 1,200 people, be defeated by Tsion, allow him to laugh at us? We will conduct a struggle to the end, until we chase him from the Academy.” The president of the Academy, Iakov Chistovich, announced the cessation of all lectures to second-year students until the conflict between Tsion and his students was settled. Protestors hailed this as a victory and pressed their advantage. On October 23, about 500 students marched on Chistovich’s house demanding that Tsion be fired and that either second-year courses be resumed or all Academy classes suspended. The famously hard-line municipal governor and chief of police General Fedor Trepov ordered security forces to forcibly suppress the demonstration.
The movement against Tsion now acquired a life of its own, spreading to St. Petersburg’s other academic institutions and igniting general student discontent. Protestors now added new demands—for example, elimination of required attendance at lectures and police surveillance on campus. Tsarist secret agents mentioned various reasons for student hostility toward Tsion—especially his strictness as a grader, his confusing lecture style, and his Jewishness.38
Conflicting interests and agendas led to the swift disintegration of support for the embattled professor. The Military and Popular Enlightenment ministries were locked in a battle over control of the Academy, which led to intrigues and tactical maneuvers that splintered authority. The Russian faction at the Academy, which had always opposed Tsion, tried to use his difficulties to its advantage. Faculty meetings became so stormy that they were discontinued. The German party initially fought for their candidate, but eventually found him dispensable.
At the university, Beketov and Redkin, dean and rector respectively, disliked Tsion personally, found his intransigence irritating, and were principally concerned with restoring calm to their campus and avoiding a rollback of recent gains in academic autonomy. They nervously monitored events, reading daily government surveillance reports as student protests swelled and, on October 26, university demonstrators demanded Tsion’s ouster. Acting on instructions from the new Minister of Popular Enlightenment Dmitrii Tolstoy, Redkin convinced Tsion to take some leave time abroad.
Tsion’s support among his conservative political allies was proving thin. Nikolai Strakhov, for example, confided that students had found an object “entirely worthy of their antipathy.” Besides being a “Yid,” Tsion was “boastful, insolent, [and] heartless” and “tried the patience of both students and professors with his infernal fussiness over his science.”39 Events finally reached the point where the authorities, too, cared most about restoring and maintaining order—and Tsion, with few devoted supporters, was sacrificed to this end.
On November 3, Minister of Popular Enlightenment Tolstoy, Minister of War Miliutin, and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich (the tsar’s brother) met to plan decisive action. The Medical-Surgical Academy, St. Petersburg University, the Technological Institute, Mining Institute, and Transportation Institute—with a total of about 4,500 students—were shuttered as police began arresting protesters and expelling them from the city. Three weeks later, Tsar Alexander II convened a meeting of the head of the Third Section (the political police) and high state ministers to discuss “the reasons for the disorders and to take the necessary measures to prevent the possibility of their repetition in the future.” In yet another rollback of Reform Era policies, the number of students in St. Petersburg was limited and the self-governance of academic institutions curtailed.40
The state had reassumed control, but Tsion’s fate was sealed. Neither the academy nor the university was eager to bring him back and risk further disorder, so in late November both institutions granted him extended leave. In January 1875, Beketov reported that Tsion’s relations with the university faculty were so poor that he should be transferred elsewhere. Minister of War Miliutin decided that it was still too early to bring him back to the Academy, and granted him another four months leave. Bitter and licking his wounds in Europe, Tsion agreed.
This set in motion the final process of his replacement. Ovsiannikov agreed to complete Tsion’s course on physiology at the academy, and the police reported on January 24 that the victorious students greeted him “most enthusiastically” as a sympathetic member of the liberal professoriate. Tsion never returned, resigning formally from both university and Academy in fall 1875.41
For Pavlov, this “wild episode” was traumatic. His adored mentor had been humiliated and his career destroyed, and his own plans for an extended apprenticeship as Tsion’s assistant had evaporated. One week after Ovsiannikov’s appearance in Tsion’s classroom, St. Petersburg University awarded Pavlov and Afanas’ev a gold medal for research conducted in the departed professor’s lab. Both recipients loyally boycotted the ceremony. A few years later, Pavlov’s fiancée noticed that he never spoke about this incident but clearly appreciated her sympathetic sarcasm about “ignoramuses wishing to receive a medical degree for playing billiards.” More than forty years later, in a public address on “The Russian Mind,” he commented bitterly on his countrymen’s attitude toward freedom of speech: “Do we have this freedom? One must say no. I remember my student years. To say anything against the general mood was impossible. You were dragged down and all but labeled a spy.”42
Crushed emotionally and crippled professionally by this unpredictable turn of events, Pavlov headed to medical school in pursuit of his now much less likely goal of a professorship in physiology. He would find other patrons, but never another mentor. Over the next fifteen years, he would make his own way in the wilderness.