While completing medical school, Pavlov was awkwardly yet ardently courting an independent young woman who, like him, had been drawn to St. Petersburg against the wishes of her family by the broader currents of her youth.
Serafima Vasil’evna Karchevskaia was born in 1855 and raised in the small Crimean port city of Kerch. The fourth of five children born to Serafima and Vasilii Karchevskii, she always recalled with nostalgia and pride her childhood years in a warm, close-knit family, and especially the strength and character of her mother. Both parents were deeply religious. Her father, a physician with Russia’s Black Sea fleet, was frequently absent. To avoid confusion, he referred to his wife as “Serafima” and his daughter as “Sara,” a name she used with intimates thereafter. She remembered her early family life as “a magical kingdom over which mother ruled,” and frequently invoked her father’s favorite saying, the Russian proverb “Everything changes; only truth remains,” and her mother’s, from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, “Learn to control yourself.”
The idyll ended at about age ten when her father died. Renting out the family home, mother and children moved into a small apartment. Serafima mère gave language lessons and soon became headmaster at a gymnasium in the regional capital, Berdiansk. The daughters all pitched in by sewing and tutoring while also, at their mother’s insistence, applying themselves at school.
Serafima possessed her mother’s strong will, and later recalled that she was also the family pet and “a great fantasist.” A lover of Russian literature and poetry, she won numerous scholastic awards at the gymnasium, including a treasured collection of Turgenev’s works. Her photo album testified to her warm relations with teachers and her popularity among the boys of her class.
The cultural and ideological currents of Reform Era Russia reached Berdiansk, just as they did Riazan, but they influenced Serafima very differently than they had Ivan Pavlov. Apart from the differences in their personalities and inclinations, the rapid changes in Reform Era discourse rendered the six-year difference in their ages almost a generational divide. Ivan had plunged into the thick journals and formed his basic worldview when Pisarev, scientism, and materialism were at the height of their influence among the youth. Serafima came of age after that tide had crested—after Karakozov’s fateful shot at the tsar and the suppression of Ivan’s favorite journals, when Petr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovskii were expounding the populist doctrines that would dominate the 1870s. The populists, too, believed in science and positive knowledge—materialism and anti-clericalism remained in vogue among the vanguard youth—but they emphasized the importance of individual conscience and rejected the shestidesiatniki’s single-minded concentration on the physiologist’s frog. Privileged, educated youth in an impoverished country, they insisted, must discharge their moral debt to the folk by helping to enlighten the peasantry and relieve their suffering. Serafima was nineteen in 1874 when many youth participated in the first khozhdenie v narod—“going to the people” in the countryside as teachers, healers, and, in some instances, propagandists of revolution. (In the last case, the peasants often turned their exotic urban visitors over to the authorities.) 1
Like many of her peers, Serafima never warmed to Pisarev, and, as she recalled many years later in a letter to her older sister Evgeniia, religious faith always remained at her spiritual center: “I remember at age 10–12 the Easter morning service. I prayed fervently and suddenly became terrified—something terrible beyond belief had occurred; and this terror, this expectation of something incredible, turned into such joy when I heard the first sounds of the prayer ‘Christ has Risen’ that my eyes teared.... This feeling was not lost, did not change ... and now, in my old age, I also expect miracles, feel the same terror, and the same joy in the great victory of our Savior who has granted us immortality.”2
Progressive youth of Serafima’s generation shared with Ivan’s a commitment to women’s liberation. In the 1860s, young Russian women were barred from the universities and forced to seek an education in various other ways. Some engaged in fictitious marriages with sympathetic men, thus freeing themselves from parental authority so they could travel abroad, particularly to Zurich, to study. In the early 1870s—motivated in part by fears of the radicalism of the expatriate student community in Zurich and the need for female physicians in the newly conquered Muslim regions of Central Asia—the state permitted the creation of Higher Women’s Courses and Women’s Medical Institutes in major cities. The Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg, for example, formally opened in 1878 and offered a four-year degree program in history and philology and in mathematics and natural sciences. By the late 1870s, many institutions also offered less ambitious pedagogical courses consisting of two- or three-year programs that certified female graduates to teach in women’s gymnasia, the early grades of some men’s gymnasia, and rural schools.3
Against her mother’s wishes, Serafima traveled to St. Petersburg in fall 1877 to enroll in the pedagogical courses established by the city’s first women’s gymnasium. She did so without precipitating the same kind of sharp, bitter break with parental authority as had Ivan when leaving seminary for St. Petersburg University. Serafima lacked intellectual self-confidence, and her instincts were decidedly moderate. Strong-willed and independent, she never rejected the traditional model of womanhood exemplified by her mother. She wanted to live life on a larger canvas, but intended basically to follow in her mother’s footsteps while also discharging her moral debt by teaching peasants how to read.
Her populism, too, was, as she put it, decidedly “not revolutionary, but evolutionary.” The failure of the movement to “go to the people” in 1874 had precipitated a crisis in the populist movement, with one tendency supporting gradualism, education, and propaganda, the other advocating revolutionary violence. That split was exacerbated in 1878, the year after Serafima’s arrival in St. Petersburg, when Vera Zasulich shot and wounded St. Petersburg Governor-General Trepov. Proponents of a terrorist offensive chose Alexander II as the main target of their hunt. Serafima found the violence abhorrent.4
In the fall of 1878, Serafima’s old friend Kiechka (Evdokiia) Prokopovich arrived to enroll in the new Higher Women’s Courses, and the pair lived together in an apartment belonging to Princess Elena Kropotkina, sister of Prince Petr Kropotkin, the well-known naturalist who had just escaped from prison and was emerging as a leader of the anarchist movement. The princess included them in her soirées, which Serafima compared to an Enlightenment salon attended by naval officers, lawyers, doctors, scholars, and students. She made friends easily and, like Ivan, traveled in a pack. She attracted at least two serious suitors, rejected a marriage proposal from a wealthy young man, and was briefly engaged.5
Yet her relative cultural conservatism set her apart. Offended by the young men’s “very crude attitudes toward us young girls,” she was puzzled when one medical student referred to them as “common property” and repelled when a sophisticate explained what that meant. In the name of women’s equality, she later recalled, “young men exploited our inexperience and desire to be `advanced.’” The sad folly of this kind of women’s emancipation would provide the theme of a novel upon which she worked intermittently in later years. In defense, she propounded her own doctrine of “women’s privilege”—by which she meant women’s right to make their own choices and acquire the superior education necessary “to be a real mother and moral teacher to her children, and an intelligent and active friend to her husband.” This model of the ideal Russian woman, whose integrity rested upon the strength of her moral compass in harmony with devotion to family, was, for her, embodied in Turgenev’s Liza (in A Nest of Gentlefolk) and Pushkin’s Tat’iana (in Onegin). That attitude isolated her from many fellow students (who often viewed her as a hopeless provincial), but “satisfied me and my close friends.”6
Most difficult and isolating was the atheism of many of her fellow students. “I fell into a whirlpool of nonbelievers,” she later recalled, and, considering herself less intelligent and well-read than many of them, became herself troubled by doubts. She sought comfort at Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral on Nevskii Prospekt, “where I stood with bowed head before the sacred icon.”7
Pavlov first heard of Serafima from his friend Stol’nikov, who regaled him with a story about her forceful rebuff of the crude advances of one male student. “A wealthy, self-important lady,” Pavlov concluded defensively, “who looks down her nose at us raznochintsy.” Stol’nikov corrected him: “She is a provincial with the scent of hunger, an unknown.” “She doesn’t look like much,” he added, “but there is something to her.”8
They met through Kiechka’s brother, a classmate of Pavlov’s at the academy, who invited him in mid-1879 to meet his sister. Pavlov appeared with his friends at the apartment that the two young women shared, but Serafima was bedridden with malaria. Thereafter, however, their circles merged into a “Society of Cheap Apartments,” together walking, talking, and attending inexpensive concerts, dances, theater, and public lectures.
Pavlov was quickly attracted to her, but was shy and inexperienced with women. He was always surrounded by his friends, Serafima later recalled, who surveyed all new acquaintances, especially women, with a highly critical eye. She found his intelligence, intensity, and good looks appealing, but disliked his indifference to the political issues of the day and did not initially take him seriously as a suitor.9 Only as the academic year drew to a close did he begin to speak to her more personally, confiding concerns about “the loss of his youthfulness.” As she prepared in May to go home for the summer, he asked permission to write to her. He would not, he promised, expect her to reply. She consented, and he devoted that summer to the “journal” with which he wooed her: “Trapped: A weekly publication of accidental origin, uncertain orientation, and a future difficult to discern.”
More comfortable as editor of Trapped than in personal encounters, Pavlov used its six issues to present himself as thoughtful, mature, idealistic, ambitious, and (less successfully) playful. The first editorial promised that Trapped would offer “serious reflections, laughter, joy, grief, relaxation, and so forth.” In its pages he entertained her with news of their mutual friends, reports on the recent trial of a murderer, the first installment of a wooden novel, and flirtatious personal ads (“Lost heart. Finder will receive half. I[van] P[avlov]”). Despite his earlier pledge, he repeatedly asked for a reassuring “reader’s response”—and was not disappointed. Thus encouraged, he abandoned the initial title of his journal—with its expression of “confusion, burden”—for the exuberant Wondrous Are Thy Works, Lord, which, its editor confided, had become his “joy, his life.”10
The journal’s ongoing centerpiece was an essay entitled “The Critical Period in the Life of a Rational Person.” Clearly and sometimes explicitly autobiographical, this essay allowed him to reveal himself under protection of a scientific cover. He adopted the pedantic tone of the experienced elder reflecting upon his youth to advise his less worldly reader. “You, my dear Reader, are youth. And Trapped aims to use this circumstance. In correspondence with you, by alternately straining the memory and looking at you, he will recall his own younger years.... He has already lived a rather long time, and examined, perhaps more than he should have, himself and others.”11
Pavlov’s essay is effectively a meditation on his passage from the passions of the youthful enthusiast to the sober pleasures of the professional scientist. An early example of his lifelong habit of reasoning physiologically and autobiographically about humankind, it expressed his lifelong conviction that all success—whether in an organism’s body, the mind’s perception of reality, the conduct of an individual life, or the organization of a society—resided in the balanced interaction of passion (and later—excitation, or freedom) and restraint (and later—inhibition, or discipline). As courtship, it expressed his passionate idealism to a young woman whose search for identity and meaning involved attaching herself to lofty goals and truths. Unable to share her Orthodox faith or populist veneration of the folk, he could express himself eloquently—and even in religious language—about science and the romance of an ideal-driven life that transcended the commonplace.
The “youthful mind,” he explained, was excitable, passionate, indefatigable, and wide-ranging; “receptive, free, unprejudiced, bold,” and constantly in search of novelty and an all-embracing worldview. Disdaining narrow specialization, it addressed “issues from all possible sciences, philosophical questions about God, the soul, and so forth; about every fact of life.” These mental characteristics, which reflected the physiological excitability of the young organism, defended it against the “tyranny of life’s trivia” and were the preconditions of true knowledge and a “rational, worthy life.”
Yet every positive attribute of the youthful mind reflected a corresponding deficiency. Its uninhibited scope and ambition—this “lighthearted stroll from one end of the universe to the other, as if it were a garden”—betrayed an ignorance of the great difficulty of attaining a real truth. Similarly, the young mind’s receptivity and lack of prejudice reflected the absence of stable opinions, and such opinions had their virtues.
As the organism aged, every thinking individual was plunged into a “critical period” during which further intellectual development depended on finding a means to preserve the strengths and transcend the weaknesses of the youthful mind. For Pavlov, the best path to intellectual maturity was that upon which he had already embarked: systematized, specialized scientific studies. Engaging in such research, one replaced the fading overseer of youthful excitation—the “authority of direct sensations”—with a new source of self-control: “conscious, systematized behavior.” The unsustainable general passions of youth yielded to the more mature satisfactions of focused, disciplined research, which developed one’s logical powers and inaugurated a new, more mature approach to knowledge: “True human happiness is guaranteed only to those who understand this task in timely fashion and devote to it all their time and effort. It is as if nature teases the young, excites their taste for the joys of intellectual life, opens the door and reveals the interesting, alluring kingdom of thought. But [into this kingdom] enters only the person who, entranced by its appearance, undertakes serious and difficult work in order to make oneself worthy of it.”12
The materialism and scientism of the shestidesiatniki would always remain part of his outlook, but, having tasted the pleasures of specialized scientific studies, he had abandoned his earlier “youthful” attitude toward knowledge for the “mature” professionalism that he had imbibed from Tsion. He now identified himself, not as an 1860s materialist, but as a scientist—as he would later put it, “a naturalist who investigates life by the method that best leads to the achievement of true knowledge.” And he easily portrayed his own development as the correct one for the young and thinkers in general.
A second, much shorter essay provided an implicit counterpoint to “The Critical Period,” revealing himself to Serafima as introspective and chronically uncertain. In her letters to him, she had apparently shared her own self-doubts, and he now confided that he, too, was a “samoed”—a person who consumes himself. “One part of him eats, the other is eaten.” He had just read Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent, an “enormous work” featuring just such a protagonist. Generalizing freely from his own experience, Pavlov explained that in the samoed thoughts and wishes constantly opposed one another, every idea elicited a contrary one, every joy the realization that this result of mere chance (sluchainost’) would inevitably be followed by equally random misfortune. When the samoed came to believe something—in his work, about people, or life—he immediately began reflexively to undermine that belief through counterarguments and a corrosive recognition of the paucity of his knowledge. “He devours his happiness, weakens his working idea.”
What creates such people, Pavlov wondered. “Nature, organization? Perhaps. But that is the province of physiology, psychology, and so forth. So let’s put it aside.” More generally, the samoed resulted from the hypocrisy of contemporary life. A child learns to read and listen carefully, to love wisdom—but then is chastised for speaking an “unacceptable truth.” Similar experiences permeated adult life, entering the inner world of the samoed and undermining his every joy, his every idea.13
Summering at her mother’s home, which was now in Rostov, Serafima shared Pavlov’s journal with her sisters Evgeniia and Raisa, but denied that anything romantic was transpiring. “Just a pleasant exchange of thoughts” between acquaintances, she insisted. Raisa, however, perspicaciously referred to him thereafter as “an artist at playing that magical flute”—that is, at appealing to Serafima’s powerfully romantic nature.14
More confident after the summer’s correspondence, Pavlov struggled to distinguish himself from Serafima’s other suitors. He managed, awkwardly but sometimes eloquently, to appeal to his self-styled Tat’iana, for example at a ball one evening at Princess Kropotkina’s home. Pavlov did not dance and was sitting alone, melancholy and fuming, as Serafima danced with other men. Another guest that evening was David Kamenskii, a Jewish medical student whom Pavlov had supervised and befriended in Botkin’s lab. Possessing a fine baritone voice, Kamenskii was studying operatic singing and was hopelessly in love with Kiechka (who was herself enamored of Pavlov’s brother Dmitrii). At the request of a “secret admirer,” Kamenskii sang for Serafima Gremin’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with the dramatic declaration: “Onegin, I will not hide from you/ That I am madly in love with Tat’iana.” (As he did so, however, he stared intently at Kiechka.) Afterwards, when Serafima asked the identity of her admirer, Kamenskii demurred but Dmitrii pointed to Pavlov, who sat silently on the window sill behind a curtain.15
As the 1879–1880 academic year wore on, Pavlov was aided by Dmitrii’s courtship of Kiechka. The foursome attended zoologist Modest Bogdanov’s talk on the history of the dog’s service to mankind, a lecture by Mendeleev (followed by a boat ride), and, in December 1879, the annual meeting of the Society of Naturalists, where they heard Kessler’s celebrated address on the evolutionary significance of mutual aid. At that meeting, Serafima could also appreciate Pavlov as a budding scientist, watching as he and Stol’nikov delivered a report on the influence of heat upon the excitability of nerves. Their relationship was sufficiently serious by Christmas for them to celebrate the holiday together with Pavlov’s relatives in St. Petersburg.
A few months later, in March 1880—by which time the couple could not avoid contemplating their future, since Serafima would soon be completing her studies and headed for home—Fyodor Dostoevsky became an important figure in their lives. Dostoevsky was at this time intervening forcefully in the pressing ideological, political, and spiritual issues of the day—in his Diary of a Writer and his novels The Adolescent and, especially, The Brothers Karamazov, which Pavlov and Serafima, like much of the reading public, discussed as it was serialized in the journal Russian Herald in 1879–1880. “Our Dostoevsky” (as Pavlov put it) provided a mutually respected point of reference as they grappled with their feelings and beliefs about a set of related, sensitive subjects that was very important for them as a couple headed, perhaps, for marriage—faith and religion, reason and science, intimacy and morality. Available sources on their sustained encounter with Dostoevsky are fragmentary—various, somewhat contradictory drafts of Serafima’s characteristically reticent memoirs and a more intimate letter she wrote decades later, and Pavlov’s half of their correspondence—but these provide some tentative insight into this revealing and emotionally important episode.16
In March 1880, Serafima helped organize a literary-musical evening to raise money for needy students in the Women’s Pedagogical Courses.17 The participants included Turgenev and Dostoevsky, each of whom read from their works. She found Turgenev impressive, but Dostoevsky awe-inspiring. As “the Prophet” spoke, “his face was completely transformed, his eyes flashed with lightning, which burned the hearts of people, and his face shined with the inspiration of a Higher power!” 18 Dostoevsky read a passage from The Adolescent in which the mother of an adolescent girl, Olia, describes their travails as pious new arrivals of meager means in St. Petersburg, and the callous, offensive, and exploitative encounters that led to her sensitive daughter’s suicide. Pavlov accompanied Serafima to the event, but she was so moved by Dostoevsky’s reading that “I do not remember who handed me my coat, under cover of which I cried from joy! How I reached home and who accompanied me, I simply do not remember.”19 Identifying with Olia and encouraged by Dostoevsky’s powerful and empathetic portrayal of her plight, she determined to confide in him about her own inner turmoil.20
The encounters with Dostoevsky that followed became a spiritual touchstone—“the most important moment in my religious life,” she confided decades later.21 She would tell the story many times, developing the following narrative for her manuscript autobiography (which remained largely unpublished during her lifetime):
Shortly after the literary evening, she and two other deputies visited Dostoevsky’s apartment to thank him. The author greeted them warmly and, to mark the occasion, gave each his photograph, asking each her name and inscribing the photo in common Russian fashion with the recipient’s first name and patronymic. When Serafima’s turn came and she supplied the name by which intimates addressed her, however, the author turned cold. “He looked at me unkindly” and inscribed the photo, not with the expected “To Sara Vasil’evna,” but rather with the curt “To Miss Karchevskaia.”22
Mystified by the bad impression she had somehow made, she was nevertheless determined to speak with him about her spiritual struggles. Mustering her courage, she returned to his flat and was admitted by a servant. Dostoevsky, however “looked at me severely, unwelcomingly, and said that he was busy.” Twice coldly rebuffed, she returned again and was ushered to his study, where the writer “politely but dryly invited me to sit.” Launching into a confession of her crisis of faith, she soon discovered the reason for his hostility: “When I said that I had been raised in a religious, Eastern Orthodox family, F. M. [Dostoevsky] exclaimed `Eastern Orthodox? Then why are you named Sara?’ I explained that my name, like my mother’s, was Serafima, that my father, who adored me, called me Sara, and that in honor of his memory I would always remain Sara. Springing from his seat, F. M. grabbed me by both hands and said: ‘How could you exchange such a marvelous, pure Orthodox name for a Yid name!’ After this clarification his face was transformed and his attitude toward me became gentle and attentive.”
Relieved to be on the right side of The Prophet’s anti-Semitism, she poured her heart out and “for the first time in my life understood my own religious beliefs.” She confessed her dislike of the Old Testament, “the history of a foreign and unlikable people [and its] ... cruel, vengeful God.... I believe in Jesus Christ for himself, for his personality, for his complete gentleness and humility, full of the fire of truth, radiant and bright; and mainly—for his complete, unlimited love.”
She then raised her main problem: was she guilty of excessive pride? Was she right to insist upon her religious faith in the face of so many intelligent critics? “I truly do not consider myself more intelligent than others, but I cannot tear myself away from my faith! Help me, reconcile me with my conscience! ... I am not especially intelligent, I am little educated, but I have to defend myself against intelligent and educated people.”
This, as she well knew, was music to Dostoevsky’s ears. He was polemicizing against Western-oriented Russian liberals and leftists who viewed as backward the religious values and faith of Russia’s simple folk, and insisting that these would give rise to a special, Russian resolution of the problems and spiritual crisis of the modern world. She would, he assured her, “always walk the radiant road of faith,” even if she wandered from it temporarily amidst life’s confusions and travails. He complimented her on her attitude toward the Bible, which, he explained, was “a Russian trait”—and invited her to return the next week.
During their next meeting she explained the importance of religion in her upbringing, and spoke of the special comfort of the Easter service. When she mentioned that of the sixteen fourth-graders she was teaching, fourteen were Jewish and only two Russian, he became especially animated: “Look, see how right I am in saying that the Yids will ruin Russia! They are seizing education, the press, and all the profitable professions; while we, from laziness and stupidity, surrender everything to them.” He assured her that doubts were necessary to true faith, and they discovered a shared preference for the icon of the Holy Mother in Kazan Church. “After this meeting,” she later recalled, “I ceased fearing my doubts.” Their last encounter was brief, ending with his counsel to “Be calm, and your soul will protect you from the plague of disbelief” and with a warm embrace.
So goes Serafima’s narrative in her manuscript autobiography. A very private person who confessed her “inability to be open,” she apparently shared little of the content of her conversations with Dostoevsky even with her intimates (including Pavlov).23 Responding many decades later to a query from her sister, she added a detail that, perhaps, reveals another dimension of that encounter:
As for ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ I lived through an entire drama while seated across from F. M. [Dostoevsky] and hungrily catching his words; only then did I understand the great significance for divine faith of the struggle with doubts. Many who believe in the power of the intellect often fall into errors, making compromises with their conscience, and only a few exceptional people who believe only in reason and the power of science remain exalted people; and the purity of their life resembles that of the sons of God, and God will take them to Himself, since, despite their lack of faith, by their deeds they were creations of His will! It is truly so.24
Serafima seems here to allude to a question she posed to Dostoevsky, not about her own crisis of faith but about that of her ardent suitor Ivan Pavlov. She attributed her own vacillations to her lack of self-confidence and intelligence, and to her consequent vulnerability to the assertive, articulate, and intellectually sophisticated atheists in her student milieu. She never expressed a firm belief “only in reason and the power of science,” nor would she have identified with the corrosive, sophisticated logic of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, brought to life in The Brothers Karamazov in a tale created by the emotionally troubled and morally crippled disciple of reason, Ivan Karamazov. Reason and science, rather, were the language of Ivan Pavlov. So this allusion to a memory of decades earlier may refer to another very personal question that she posed to Dostoevsky, or simply reflected upon in his presence: if, as he insisted, faith in God and immortality was necessary to a reliable morality, could a young man such as Ivan Pavlov be dependably good and moral—a suitable life companion for an Orthodox believer? If so, Dostoevsky’s affirmative response would have proven profoundly reassuring, memorable, and—in Serafima’s mind, as she concludes in her final sentence, written after their long life together had been lived and the verdict was in—prophetic.
By spring 1880, Serafima and Pavlov, and Dmitrii and Kiechka, seemed headed for marriage. The two women “fantasized more than once of living a warm and happy common family life,” Serafima later recalled, “but God decided otherwise.”25 If so, an agent of divine will was the young men’s mother, who lived periodically with them and made abundantly clear her disapproval of their paramours. The Pavlovs had decided that Ivan should marry his cousin Zinaida. Her father—a cleric to whom Dmitrii referred smirkingly as the “Synod rat”—offered a 40,000 ruble dowry to his prospective son-in-law, which, according to Serafima, played a considerable role in the Pavlovs’ enthusiasm for the match and their hostility toward Serafima and Kiechka. Whether because he enjoyed the bachelor life, feared commitment or, as Serafima suspected, lacked the will to defy his parents, Dmitrii never proposed to Kiechka. She eventually married Kamenskii, who had long loved her hopelessly from afar and who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in order to claim her hand.26
Pavlov waited until the last moment, proposing to Serafima in June 1880 as she prepared to leave St. Petersburg for home. She accepted immediately and they strolled happily through St. Petersburg until four in the morning.
Their intimates were skeptical. Dmitrii warned Serafima that, although Ivan’s plans for an idealistic life together might send her swooning “beyond the stars,” she should prepare for a more prosaic reality: “He is used to being spoiled and looked after, and knows nothing about life.” She would have to take all practical matters into her own hands—not just arranging for food, clothing, and shelter, but also “You will have to see that [he] doesn’t walk around in galoshes with holes in them, doesn’t get his feet soaked, that he has winter gloves, a decent and inexpensive suit, and so forth.” Stol’nikov thought them utterly incompatible, and Serafima’s sister Raisa, having learned of the Pavlovs’ attitude, urged her not to marry into such an unwelcoming family.27
Serafima postponed her departure from St. Petersburg until late June, when her money ran out, forcing her to leave for Rostov. Pavlov, now a student in the Military-Medical Academy’s graduate Institute, and attached to the Academy’s hospital, took a month’s vacation to meet her family and friends. Riazan lay directly on the train route from Petersburg to Rostov, but he apparently did not stop there to make peace with his parents and seek their blessing. That unpleasant task he left for Serafima to undertake later and on her own.
He arrived in Rostov in midsummer, but without the funds for their planned trip to visit Serafima’s sister Evgeniia, who lived with her husband in the Ukrainian countryside. Nor, it turned out, had he brought the money necessary for a return ticket to St. Petersburg. In fulfillment of Dmitrii’s prophecy, Serafima needed to arrange things herself, drawing upon her own scant resources to avoid the embarrassment of revealing her fiancé’s fecklessness.28
His stay, however, proved pleasant and successful. Raisa thought him “most kind” and a man of quality: “He is a good man, Sarochka, a man of a piece [tsel’nyi]—take care of him and don’t spoil his character, as all we women tend to do masterfully.” Her brother Sergei reported after a second meeting in St. Petersburg that “The more I know him, the more I like and respect him.” He also passed along Serafima mère’s assessment that her idealistic daughter had “found, if not entirely, then more or less closely, that which you sought.”29
They decided to marry the next spring, during Easter week. Serafima insisted upon first teaching in the countryside for a year, assuring her anxious fiancé that she planned not to propagandize against the state, but only to imbue the peasantry with a love of learning. The postponement also made good practical sense. Pavlov insisted that his wife not work outside the home, and his salary of 50 rubles per month as an Institute physician was hardly enough to support them. A year of disciplined work should suffice, they agreed, for him to pass his doctoral exams and make good progress on his doctoral thesis, completion of which would qualify him for a better-paying position. He pledged that he would use the year of their engagement to do so.
Determined to maintain their equality and avoid the loss of intimacy so common among married couples, they decided that Pavlov would keep Serafima informed about his thesis so she could participate in its final stages when they were reunited. In that spirit, he signed a declaration, witnessed by Sergei and Raisa, affirming that “in the summer months of 1881 Sara will take an active and useful part in the physiological investigations for my work on a doctoral dissertation—on the condition, of course, that she sincerely desires to do so.”30
Departing for St. Petersburg, he gave her as an engagement gift a volume by the positivist philosopher, evolutionist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer. (She had been reading Kant, and he had for months tried to convince her that the answers she sought were to be found in Spencer instead.) He inscribed the gift in the spirit of the mature mind: “Sociology, Sara, is the most complex, the most difficult science, and it still remains, and almost completely, for the human mind to elaborate it; it is not a matter of feelings, conversations, and hurried all-resolving, one-sided works, although these be by good people. This conviction, I hope, will be profoundly and firmly implanted in your soul by my favorite author. Fervently wishing you truth, your Iv. Pavlov.”31
Of all his engagement vows, Ivan would keep just one—to joyfully marry Serafima. Not, as planned, during Easter—since he was still taking his doctoral exams—but in May 1881 (and even then, two exams still remained). As for his thesis, Serafima later recalled ruefully that during their year apart “not only did he not defend his dissertation, he did no work on it.”32
Yet he was hardly idle that year. He managed Botkin’s lab, taught courses on physiology to medical students and the feldshers (medical paraprofessionals) of St. George’s Commune, and studied sporadically for his doctoral exams. He pursued his thesis work, however, desultorily at best, devoting most of his free time and creative energy to correspondence with Serafima. In the mornings, he arose, washed, and then would “turn to you with my first thought ... and, mainly, with my first feeling ... like a true Christian beginning each day with a prayer.” Those prayer sessions often expanded to his entire day, during which he read and reread her letters, and composed and edited his own.33
That religious language permeated his letters, serving for both intimate confession and courtship. It expressed, often painfully, his struggle to replace the certainties of his abandoned faith with the secular alternatives of science, scientism, and personal intimacy; and, at the same time, appealed for Serafima’s intimacy and trust. “I myself do not believe in god,” he reminded her in one letter, but the religious tone of his letters reassured her that he did share her basic values and goals.34 Reading these letters, one senses that, for Pavlov, these two functions of his religious language were mutually reinforcing: by explaining himself in religious terms to his devout fiancée—and gaining, if not her agreement, then her understanding and confidence—he drew upon her religious faith as an emotional and cultural source of support for his own psychologically difficult secular quest.
Never again would he be such a prolific and revealing correspondent. Serafima, however, removed her half of their correspondence from the family archive to preserve her privacy after her husband’s death, so we have only the faint echo of her voice in his replies.
Pavlov assumed, often pompously, the role of wise elder, but confessed frequently to his emotional insecurity and neediness. Serafima was emotionally much steadier, but intellectually insecure. During the academic year 1880–1881, she was teaching in a small rural school near Taganrog, in the Don region. Living in the schoolhouse, she taught younger children from 9 a.m. to 3 p. m., older children from 3 to 6, and adults in the evening. Life was difficult and her work gratifying but exhausting. One year, she soon decided, was quite enough.
Pavlov’s letters provide an interesting self-portrait. He described himself as a “kindhearted person affected by everything,” as an emotional idealist “not fit for life among adults. I am never at peace with this comedy of life, with this superficiality, so distant from true wishes, intentions, feelings, thoughts.”35 Contrary to the assessment of Serafima and her friends, he was decidedly not, he confessed, a well-integrated personality. He struggled constantly to reconcile his thoughts with his feelings, and his tendencies toward laziness, dissolution, and the scattering of his efforts with his ideal of self-discipline and desire for achievement.36
The integrated personality remained for him an ideal that, both intellectually and emotionally, he identified with the unity of opposites (like mind and body in seminary). “Ideas and human feelings are two powerful forces in man—and this ends, it seems to me ... not in the victory of one over the other but in their merging.” Happiness without thought was an illusion, “an obligatory smile amidst the soul’s bitter tears,” and thought without human feelings degenerated into “bitter skepticism.” The two could be integrated, however, through frankness, love, and the achievement of a mature mind. 37
As a matter of principle, and as a harbor from emotional insecurity, he required frankness and uninhibited criticism with his intimates. “I could not live with a person who did not wish to know and did not permit me to express my impressions regarding the various sides” of his or her character. He enjoyed “comments about my weaknesses, especially from people who love me.” Disgusted by Dmitrii’s undisciplined life of wine and cards, he was “on the verge of a break” with him over their right to point out each others’ flaws. His need for the honesty and emotional reassurance of such mutual frankness was, he confided, “my ineffable characteristic.”38
This commitment was part of a larger struggle—both logical and emotional—to find secular alternatives to the abandoned certainties of religious faith and theology. Unshrinking rationality and a commitment to truth, he wrote, were the basis of his struggle for personal virtue. “It is for me a kind of God, before whom I reveal everything, before whom I discard wretched worldly vanity. I always think to base my virtue, my pride, upon the attempt, the wish for truth, even if I cannot attain it.... Let other things change, what is important to me is my own consciousness of the rightness of my behavior.”39
Just as truth was his “God,” so was their relationship “our faith”—and he often invoked it (“Believe!”) when worried that she had become distant or angry. In passionate passages, he joined that faith to his emotional salvation and their pursuit of higher ideals:
You are restoring my lost youthfulness. Every day, every moment, I see how the thoughts, feelings, sensations of better years come to life, are reborn in my soul. I believe again in the power of thought, in the triumph of truth, in the truth of the ideal, normal life; I believe, not by words but by sensations, in limitless development, in the inexhaustibility and eternal freshness of exalted pleasures.... This is what I dreamed of while enduring all the dark, bitter time of decline in my life.... Oh sweet dreams! Thank you!40
The couple also discussed faith, reason, science, morality, and intimacy in the context of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.41 In several letters, Pavlov confessed to identifying uncomfortably with Ivan Karamazov, whose harsh rationality and inability to make a religious leap of faith condemned him to nihilism, spiritual disintegration, and mental breakdown—and to indirect responsibility for the murder of his father. (In at least two of her replies, Serafima clearly encouraged him to elaborate on this theme.) “The more I read, the more uneasy my heart became,” Pavlov wrote. “Say what you will, but he bears a great resemblance to your tender and loving admirer.” Karamazov’s “basic nature, or at least his given state, is the same as mine. Obviously, this is a man of the intellect.... The mind, the mind alone has overthrown everything, reconstructed everything.... And the person was left wooden-headed, with a terrible coldness in the heart, with the sensation of a strange emptiness in his being.”42 Reason brought Karamazov its rich satisfactions—“recall the Grand Inquisitor and such great flights of moral thought”—yet he led a sorry life.43 Pavlov described his own state by citing Ivan Karamazov’s confession that he would gladly surrender the pleasures of reason for the comforts of faith: “I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine.”44 Yet, for both Karamazov and Pavlov, a combination of “your nature and accidental circumstances” (that is, inborn character and life experiences) rendered this impossible.45 The essential problem, he continued in a later letter, was not (as Dostoevsky would have it) “the triumph of reason,” but rather “our very nature”—and so raised an important challenge that was unfortunately beyond the limitations of contemporary science: understanding “the human type.”46
He also identified in a similar vein with liberal essayist Konstantin Kavelin’s description of “the modern Mephistopheles.” Kavelin’s devil had assumed a form consistent with the recent successes of deterministic natural science, as Pavlov explained: “Considering himself a part of nature, and believing in the necessary lawfulness of everything that exists,” contemporary man had devalued the emotional and subjective side of life. That, he reminded Serafima, was his own “inextricable issue.” Yet here again he identified this as a problem with human nature, and so a challenge for science. How did one reconcile a law-governed universe with the special qualities of personal life, in which “these laws are not in effect, where freedom necessarily rules”? Science remained too primitive to offer more than “pathetic” explanations, so man remained unable to understand “the sense, the force of his personal aspirations and efforts.” Human psychology, then, constituted “one of the last secrets of life, the secret of the manner in which nature, developing by strict, unchangeable laws, came in the form of man to be conscious of itself.”47 Returning to this point a few weeks later in another reflection about The Brothers Karamazov, he added: “Where is the science of human life? Not even a trace of it exists. It will, of course, but not soon, not soon.”48
In the meantime, he assured Serafima that he had devised a set of practical resolutions of these issues.49 Although science offered as yet no prescriptions for life, a mature approach to scientific research could provide both spiritual satisfaction and a robust, ethical connection to other people.50 One must work by a strict schedule with a definite plan. The deep, inspirational satisfaction of such a mature approach resided in the acquisition of results, the consciousness of one’s productivity, and (as for a religious believer) “the struggle with circumstances and with one’s own weaknesses.” The usefulness of scientific results, and their interest for other researchers, guaranteed that such research, even when pursued for reasons of purely personal interest, was “vital”—that is, it joined the researcher to a community and served humanity (and so was moral). And, as he explained in many letters, his practical strategy for dealing with the lofty, currently unresolvable question of the relationship between body and mind involved a strict schedule integrating both physical and mental activities.51
When Dostoevsky died at the end of January 1881, Pavlov joined many others who hurried to the Prophet’s apartment to pay their respects, and he returned the next morning to join some 50,000 mourners who accompanied the coffin to the Alexandro-Nevskaia Lavra. Describing to Serafima the “endless wreaths” borne by representatives of all strata of society and the singing of religious hymns by church choirs and schoolchildren, Pavlov observed that Dostoevsky’s spiritual exemplar Aleksei Karamazov had become an exalted moral model for youth, and that the writer himself “has raised, exalted the soul of all the thinking and feeling city of Petersburg.” A few days later he reviewed newspaper accounts to report at length on the eulogies and commentaries. He dwelled upon the surprising revelation by Dostoevsky’s friend and publisher Aleksei Suvorin that the writer intended to write a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov in which the deeply religious Aleksei Karamazov becomes, as Pavlov put it, a “Russian socialist”—a revolutionary of a new type, drawing upon Russian, rather than European, traditions. “Did you think, my dear, that our Dostoevsky could become such a socialist, a radical!” The great outpouring of affection for Dostoevsky and his ideals, he concluded, would have pleased the writer enormously. “So many people at his grave decided, pledged, to be better, to resemble him. As have we, my dear Sara!”52
Despite Serafima’s constant encouragement, Pavlov consistently failed in one respect to practice what he preached—repeatedly confessing and lamenting his failure to establish a regular routine in his life and work.53
His difficulties with self-discipline were hardly unusual, with one exception: his temper. Usually loving and introspective, his letters were punctuated by the same angry explosions that characterized his behavior in face-to-face encounters. After Serafima reproached him for one epistolary outburst he confessed that his thoughts sometimes took a “crude, insulting form.”54 Not comforted by her reminder that she, too, was temperamental, he added “Your mistakes are normal, with some basis. Mine are morbid, spontaneous paroxysms.”55 When at home writing a letter, he sometimes bided his time and waited for these “paroxysms” to pass. Afterwards, in the spirit of honest intimacy, he would describe them in detail. In September 1880, for example, he explained why he had not posted a letter the day before: “Yesterday evening I endured an attack of nastiness like never before. Be calm: it was only a display of my own pettiness. It was almost amusing: I cursed my philosophy, all my theories, and finally cursed my attachment to you, an affection bringing me such grief! I wanted to dump all this on you and sign myself the old grumbler, the decrepit jade, but something restrained me. I decided to await a change in mood.”56 Sometimes he failed to restrain himself and mailed letters of this “accursed genre.” Serafima would then be hurt and Pavlov contrite. “Why didn’t I refrain from writing everything that I thought during this fit of spleen? I am ashamed of treating you to such nonsense, which is useless for both of us.”57Despite his best intentions, a day or two without a letter from her sufficed to produce curt, fearful, and even insulting missives. Ten such days in March 1881 left him extremely “angry and unpleasant.” There were “so many hypotheses” about her silence. “I won’t send a kiss. Who knows? Perhaps it is ‘repulsive.’”58 He eventually learned that Serafima’s village had been flooded. The letter for which he apologized most profusely is apparently missing from his archive, indicating, perhaps, that she destroyed it. “I am terribly guilty before you for sending that one letter [and] for the curtness of my two most recent ones,” he wrote afterwards. Two weeks later he was apologizing again: “My dearest Sarushka, do you know what I fear most now? The impression upon you of my letters during Shrovetide. God grant that the first week of Lent, when you are reading them, pass quickly. I am truly suffering over them.”59
She patiently forgave his tantrums, taking him to task only when she felt he was violating their vows of equality. In November, amid long, sometimes pedantic letters about his philosophy of life, he wrote that “my task is to help to develop, and to preserve from various dangers and random events [sluchainosti] that which exists in your mind and heart.” She objected sharply that he had begun “giving me a program of behavior. You forgot that I have my own will and that I will never agree to subordinate myself to leaders.” This time it took him a few weeks (during which one of her letters “actually cast out of my soul all conscious content of my love for you”) to set things right.60
In his letters, Pavlov never explored their differing beliefs regarding religion and populist politics. During Easter, he mentioned that it would be wonderful to share the holiday with “you, a believer” and referred casually to his own atheism. As for the folk, he was chiefly concerned that Serafima not endanger herself by a casual comment that might be construed as politically disloyal. “People can play dirty even without ill will.” Life in Riazan had immunized him against romanticizing the peasantry, and he counseled her to “love, but don’t sentimentalize.” Reading Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer in August 1880, he rejected the novelist’s core view that folk religiosity constituted genuine enlightenment. The peasantry’s main virtue, rather, was the habit of hard work; and students, he quipped, would do well to “go to the people”—not to teach and preach, but to learn: “We all—you and I, our fellow students—are from the privileged, not the working class; we live without labor—this is our social characteristic and we carry this into our student life. Look at all the students and tell me: can one really say that they are working? Truly, they amuse themselves like lords.”61
He was himself working aimlessly, by fits and starts. “I will work in the Laboratory only tomorrow,” he wrote several weeks after returning to Petersburg from a visit to Serafima and her family in Rostov, adding defensively that the delay “was not my doing; first they were cleaning the Laboratory, and then came the holidays.” He had, however, begun the regular physical exercise that was the necessary first step to a productive working season: “With me, putting life on a desirable footing has always begun with regular [pravil’nyi] and systematic physical labor. Being physically energetic has been the necessary condition of consistent intellectual energy. This is happening now. I have already begun to regularly practice gymnastics. What a rich sensation and mood I acquire during and after it.” All else would surely fall into place. Five days later, he was “like an out of tune guitar that is now being tuned up string by string. The gymnastics string is set. Now the laboratory activities string is being put into order. I am beginning to go to the Laboratory punctually, and gymnastics gives me the strength to endure rather easily the day’s great physical labor.... There still remain the unsettled, untuned strings of scientific studies at home and reading on the side. But not immediately!” Thus fortified, he vowed to refrain from socializing unless he really needed rest.62
A botched experiment soon turned his attention to organizational problems in Botkin’s lab, giving birth to a lifelong preoccupation with the effective management of laboratory work. He asked Botkin for “complete authority in the Laboratory and am now beginning the reform.” Four days later, he wrote proudly that everybody had embraced his changes enthusiastically. “I already wrote that I was made administrator and judge. All reprimands, all the affairs of the janitors, all incidents among those working here—they are all mine, they all pass through me, and the bickering between the workers and the doctors must end completely.” By the end of September, he was crowing: “Order has had its effect: it has made people almost unrecognizable. Politeness, solicitousness, patience, the desire to help others”—these now characterized his well-run lab.63
He proved much less successful with his thesis, in part because, lacking the guidance of a senior physiologist, his search for a topic was floundering. In mid-September he became briefly enamored of a “very, very daring and important idea”—that nerves governed “the very production, the very formation of the blood.” It was a tenuous hypothesis and pursuing it would occupy at least six months—but “God guides the brave.” This notion vanished shortly thereafter, as did all mention of his thesis.64
In November he accepted the invitation of a group of medical students to earn some money by delivering private lectures on physiology. Now he would buckle down, concentrate on his own experiments, and “make myself a pure physiologist. Lecturing, working in physiology—this is now my entire task.” But, he wrote Serafima, “You know what difficulty has emerged for me now? As always occurs, one dreams of, wants to undertake immediately, no less than ten projects. This is what I do not know—how to limit myself a little more sensibly.” All mention of his research soon vanished from his letters, and by month’s end he was speculating that perhaps his true calling was teaching.65
When her countryside school recessed for Christmas, Serafima set out for what must have been a most sobering visit to Petersburg. Pavlov asked her to stop in Riazan on the way to pick up his brother Sergei and meet his father. Petr Dmitrievich greeted her coldly and paid for Sergei’s train fare only, forcing her to share her scarce provisions with him on the road. She arrived in the capital, hungry, to find that Pavlov’s mother—who opposed their marriage—was living with her son. Upon her arrival, Serafima entrusted him with her money—a gesture of confidence that she soon regretted. He treated her to the theater, concerts, carriage rides, and candy; she bought herself a pair of shoes. As she prepared to depart, he confessed that her funds were exhausted and suggested that she ask his mother for train fare. Serafima managed to borrow enough from Kiechka to manage another long, hungry trip. Unpacking in the countryside she discovered that one shoe was missing. Her fiancé had taken it as a keepsake.66
She evidently took him to task about his work habits, for his letters became noticeably more defensive about his use of time. He was constantly attempting to systematize his approach to the working day—and constantly failing. “I passionately love, so to speak, the sensation of a businesslike mood, a businesslike time,” and only systematic work was efficient and socially justifiable. Yet he frequently confessed to days like this one: he lectured to the feldshers in the morning, then gossiped at the Academy, lunched, and arrived at the lab in early evening for an unsuccessful experiment, after which he dined with friends until three in the morning. In one letter of March 1881, he admitted to “stupidly and boringly” chatting with acquaintances until 4 a.m., and dutifully confessed to still other sins: three times in one day he had broken his pledge to Serafima that he would not drink. He apologized, “but you demand from me complete abstinence.” The alternating vows and confessions continued throughout spring and summer.67
Whiling away the hours, he read fiction (including Zola, Thackeray, and Shakespeare), attended concerts (Anton Rubinstein’s new compositions moved him to tears), and conceived a lifelong interest in art, particularly that of the Travelers (peredvizhniki), who combined realism with an emotional attachment to the Russian folk and countryside. In November 1880, he waxed poetic about Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Night on the Dnepr: “The moon and its reflection in the river really shine as in nature. And the entire painting reminds me of what we saw on the Don during those moonlit evenings. It’s just a shame that I am left only to imagine the main thing for us!”68
He emerged onto Nevskii Prospekt from the Travelers’ first independent art exhibit, in March 1881, to learn that the radical group People’s Will had assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Traveling by carriage on his way to the Winter Palace, the tsar had been wounded terribly by a bomb and died shortly thereafter. “Everybody is so benumbed, silent, shocked,” Pavlov reported the next day. Reactions to the assassination disturbed him almost as much as the crime itself. “Russia is in a disgraceful, dishonest, pitiful state,” he fumed. “Oh, if you heard the immoral tone of today: a mixture of natural indignation at the crime and hints to the contrary.” Here he was responding to a sentiment among the left-liberal intelligentsia that the assassination, however lamentable, had resulted from the tsar’s reversal of his earlier reformist course, and that perhaps the new tsar, Alexander III, would reinvigorate and extend those reforms. He detested this “ambiguity, duplicity.”69
The consequences of his lack of discipline now bore down upon him. First, there were the looming medical exams. In the first three months of 1880, he had passed the easiest of these and successfully performed a forensic analysis of a corpse. Now, however, he faced exams in subjects for which he was poorly prepared—clinical and operative surgery, and anatomy and practical anatomy. Having warned Serafima that he would probably fail—which would jeopardize their Easter wedding—he managed to cram successfully for the first of these and felt “gloriously strong” as a result.70
His thesis research suffered another setback when he reluctantly concluded that he could not study intact, “normal” animals because the necessary “operations cannot succeed in the hygienic conditions of our Laboratory.... So it’s not my fault. I’ll take up other experiments that do not require the animals upon which I operate to remain alive.”71 He had not even clearly defined the subject of his doctoral thesis (which he had pledged to nearly complete by the time of their wedding), but agreed to deliver lectures to another group of medical students.
Things began to unravel in early April. First, he learned that his final three exams were now scheduled during the Easter holiday. Again, “it wasn’t my fault”: one professor had taken more time than expected to prepare his exams, and three of the Institute’s seven students had decided to get the exams behind them quickly (in other words, non-procrastinators would be free by Easter).72
Poorly prepared for his exams and with his thesis subject still undefined, he was further burdened by his obligation to assist the Institute physicians in Botkin’s lab with their doctoral theses. He was developing his skills as a lab manager, but with respect to his own physiological research, this time was largely wasted. Most of the subjects Botkin assigned his students concerned the action of various pharmacological agents on bodily organs, but some did not (for example, he asked one investigator to explain the coating of the tongue). Pavlov’s job was to guide research on these diverse topics to a successful conclusion, which required him to expend much time and effort on work that he usually found dull and pointless. “It is a shame that I will have to do the experiments of others ... These themes come from Botkin, sometimes entirely, and they are entirely incoherent; my participation in such experiments is made entirely mechanical, very boring.” These sentiments notwithstanding, he was proving an effective and popular assistant, earning the gratitude and loyalty of the some fifteen Institute physicians who completed their theses with his help during his ten-year tenure in the lab.73
His teaching ended most inauspiciously when both the feldshers and the medical students canceled their sessions with him. Pavlov recognized guiltily that his hurriedly prepared lectures had been “not especially useful.”74
Two weeks later he failed the practical exam on anatomy, which tested clinical skills—such as the diagnostic use of percussion and auscultation—that interested him little. He had hoped to pass, since the patient usually served only as an occasion for general discussion about clinical issues, but: “Yesterday [Prof. Eikhval’d] examined me himself, and I, of course, could display no skill in [diagnostic] investigation. The patient attracted his special attention because he is an interesting case and had just been admitted to the clinic. So it was an especially unfortunate accident.” It was another blow to his morale, but of only minor practical consequence, since he was entitled to retake the exam within the next eight months. “I will auscultate, percuss a bit more—and that is all!” Yet he worried that he had been “reduced in your eyes.” And he had had enough. Claiming illness, he postponed his exam in surgery, eventually passing it, along with anatomy, in December 1881.
His lectures had gone poorly, he had failed to take (let alone pass) his doctoral exams in time for an Easter wedding, and he had made negligible progress on his thesis. It had been “a bad, bad spring.”75
In mid-May, Pavlov departed for their wedding in Rostov. His parents would not attend, so he felt obligated to stop in Riazan on the way. “I don’t want to be there longer than half a day; perhaps I’ll be detained a day, but no longer.”76
Reunited in Rostov, the couple strolled along the Don River on moonlit nights, talking enthusiastically about their future. Serafima was entranced by Pavlov’s plans and his passionate personification of the shestidesiatniki’s vision of the scientist’s service to humanity. Her own generation “was much taken by the idea of service to the [Russian] people,” but his dream was even loftier: to serve “not only the people but all of mankind! ... Having infinite respect for [his] intellectual abilities, I felt that, supported by his strong arm, I had been raised into a magical kingdom.” She no doubt also hoped that her own strength might compensate for the weaknesses he had displayed so clearly over the past year, enabling his success and making her a full partner in that lofty vision.
Raisa, like Dmitrii before her, raised a sobering thought: who would do the housework? And what of the novel about Russian women that Serafima planned to write? “That is a trifle,” she replied; “I shall take all trifles upon myself” in order to free her husband for scientific work. She would write the novel in her free time. The married Raisa laughed kindly at her naiveté. 77
The wedding, on May 25, was modest. Serafima wore the dress of one sister, the shoes of another, and the bridal veil of the third. Raisa and Taisiia, their husbands, and a few close friends attended. Serafima mère was ill and being cared for at the Ukrainian countryside home of her oldest daughter, Evgeniia, so they were absent. Raisa’s father-in-law conducted the service and paid for the candles, so the newlyweds paid only the five-ruble fee for the deacon (Serafima Karchevskaia thus became Serafima Pavlova, exchanging the feminine form of her father’s family name for that of her husband). Kiechka’s father provided music for the dancing afterwards by playing upon a bottle with a knife. Afterwards, Serafima discovered that, once again, Pavlov had failed to plan for the return trip, and once again she furtively collected the necessary funds in order to conceal his carelessness.
A few days later, they left Rostov to visit Evgeniia and Serafima’s mother, and then traveled to Riazan for an unpleasant week with the Pavlovs. In their straightened circumstances the young couple had hoped for some financial assistance, but were disappointed. Serafima had come to despise Petr Dmitrievich as a “miserly and hard-hearted egotist.”78
They finally escaped to a summer home that Pavlov had rented in Malaia Izhora, not far from St. Petersburg. They spent August there alone—swimming in the sea, walking in the woods, and talking excitedly about their future. Pavlov reminded her of his “passion for systematization” and solicited her ideas about organizing their new life. Happy to oblige, she asked that he abstain from drinking and cards, that they receive visitors only on Saturday evenings, and themselves go out only on Sunday evenings. He agreed enthusiastically.79
The difficult year 1880–1881 was behind them, and they were now together, committed, and excited by common dreams. Their true Time of Troubles, however, was about to begin.