Serafima ran a well-organized household that provided a supportive environment for her children and, first and foremost, a base of operations for her husband’s research. After years of privation and chaos, she rejoiced at the opportunity to finally organize their domestic life, to care for her growing family—six-year-old Vladimir was joined by a sister, Vera, in 1890; a brother, Viktor, in 1892; and another brother, Vsevolod, in 1893—and to devote herself to the intimate friendships and religious faith at the center of her spiritual life.
The couple’s earlier ideals regarding equality and intimate involvement in each other’s concerns had vanished during the grueling 1880s amid poverty and disorder, Serafima’s poor health and demoralization, Pavlov’s increasingly specialized scientific research, and a domestic division of labor that seemed natural and desirable to them both. Serafima’s ideal of Tat’iana-style womanhood had always distinguished her from her more feminist acquaintances and was fully compatible with her wholehearted embrace of the role of matriarch in a professor’s family and facilitator of the work of a scientist whom she always considered brilliant. As the Pavlovs’ devoted friend Boris Babkin put it, the “vivacious, gay, and clever” young woman whom Pavlov had married in 1881 became by the mid-1890s a “stolid matron who sacrificed all her interests for the happiness of her husband and children.”1
The couple’s domestic arrangements, then, had long since been “turned by life onto the ordinary road” (in Pavlov’s unintentionally prophetic phrase of earlier years) when he approached Serafima for a serious conversation on that subject at mid-decade: “I’ve long wanted to talk with you seriously about our personal relations. You know that I long dreamed of your participation in my scientific work.... Your illness and the difficult conditions of our life prevented us from fulfilling this plan. Now, seeing your...exalted understanding of the obligations of motherhood and finding in you always an interesting and spiritually kindred companion and a considerate friend, who has freed me from all minor tasks, I find that for me nothing could be more pleasant and useful than the atmosphere that I find at home, where I can rest from my scientific thoughts. It would be hard for me to also breathe at home a physiological atmosphere.” With a wryness rare in her reminiscences about her husband, Serafima noted that he made this pronouncement fifteen years into their marriage. It was clearly his guilty acknowledgment of a long-abandoned ideal.2
She was equally comfortable with this arrangement—and her rejection of the feminism of the 1860s and 1870s became a motif in her reminiscences and other writings. In her memoirs, she recalled a conversation with family friend and chemist-physician Ekaterina Shumova-Simanovskaia, a fervent proponent of the equality of women who “objected very strongly to my own rejection of an independent role in life to become just I. P.’s wife. Laughing, I asked her what use there would be if I were to write two or three novels? ‘Would it really be worthwhile to lose even one experiment in IP’s laboratory?’” Serafima actually wrote quite a bit—poems, short stories, religious reflections, and hymns to God—intended not for publication, but for her own comfort and self-expression and for the amusement and edification of her children.3
She also helped with her husband’s scientific work. He liked to “think aloud,” and in the 1890s she provided a willing and supportive audience. When he was plagued by doubts, she reassured him; and when he wanted to dictate his Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands (1897), she transcribed his words in her neat hand for his editorial attention. Their apartment was spacious and light, with high ceilings and large rooms. The location proved ideal for Pavlov, since both the Academy and the IEM were easily accessible. Directly across the street was the Vvedenskaia Church, which Serafima, who began and ended every day with a prayer, attended regularly.
She celebrated the family’s newfound prosperity by purchasing several pieces of fine-quality furniture from the fashionable San-Galli firm: three bookcases for Pavlov’s study, two beds and a chair that would remain with the couple for the rest of their lives, and a large divan for the living room. Sometime in the 1890s, Pavlov’s brother Dmitrii bought the family a piano, which two of their children learned to play. The bookcases filled quickly, not with scientific and medical books (which Pavlov kept largely at work) but with the authoritative Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia and the volumes that the family gave as gifts on birthdays and name days. Among Serafima’s early presents to Pavlov were three literary works in luxurious bindings: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust. Guests were welcome to leaf through his collection and even to sit and read one of his books—but never to take a treasured tome out of the apartment.4 He had little time for non-science reading during the nine-month work season. He did peruse a newspaper daily—closely following, for example, the Anglo-Boer war (and rooting for the Boers). Throughout the academic year, he put appealing books aside for the summer with the comment “We’ll read it at the dacha.”5
The salaries from his two positions enabled the large family to live comfortably, but the fixed expenses of doing so left few discretionary funds. So Serafima’s household budget was modest. She depended upon friends and relatives to indulge the children in such luxuries as toys and chocolate, and occasionally borrowed money from Pavlov’s cousin Alexander, who lived with them from 1897 to 1902.
They could now afford the sine qua non of upper-middle-class life: servants. As was common practice, they paid the building’s doorkeeper and yard-keeper to provide firewood for their apartment and perform various household tasks, and hired a live-in cook. Complex relationships developed between the family and its servants—employer-employee relations, to be sure, but also much more than that. One example also captures the pervasive role of alcoholism in the lives of the folk in the Pavlovs’ circle. The doorkeeper’s cousin, Vasilii Shuvalov, became, as Serafima put it, “our man, always helping with the apartment.” When Vasilii’s drinking prevented him from performing his duties, his son Ivan took over. Serafima tutored him in the evenings, and became quite fond of him and confident in his abilities. When Pavlov’s longtime lab assistant, Nikolai, became so drunk that he had to be hospitalized, Serafima convinced her husband to hire Ivan in his place. (Nikolai was in the habit of getting seriously drunk once or twice a year. Pavlov, who despised heavy drinking, would become angry and threaten to fire him—but he never did. This time, Pavlov arranged for Nikolai to be treated at the elite Alexander III Home for the Care of the Mentally Ill, where Pavlov’s friend Timofeev was director.) Ivan Shuvalov performed well in the lab, and after Nikolai’s return the pair served together as Pavlov’s lab attendants. Much impressed with him, Pavlov was planning to promote him to operator when tragedy struck: Ivan Shuvalov fell in love with Nikolai’s daughter and joined his father Vasilii in heavy drinking at the wedding, which, according to Serafima, “set loose the family drunkenness, taking them both to their grave.”
Since his childhood Pavlov had always had somebody looking after his everyday needs—his brother Dmitrii in the 1860s and 1870s, and Serafima thereafter. So during his tenure with the Pavlovs, Vasilii served also as manservant in May, when Serafima and the children had already departed for their summer home at Sillamiagi. After seeing the rest of the family off at the station, Vasilii kept track of Pavlov’s clothes and keys, cleaned his shoes and boots, prepared his baths, paid the bills, bought milk, and placed a fresh roll and butter in his coat pocket as he left each morning for work. After Vasilii’s death, another servant, Ivan Lebedev, assumed these same functions until 1918.6
The only permanent live-in servant at the Pavlov household was the cook, Mar’iushka, a beloved member of the household from 1892 until her death some sixteen years later. “This was a woman of strong character, with a sense of her own dignity, modest and loving,” Serafima recalled. The widow of a chef, she had learned to cook “artistically”—which pleased Pavlov, who ate little but appreciated tasty simple food. Her meals were pleasant, filling, and to the patriarch’s taste—usually beginning with soup (most frequently shchi, cabbage soup), followed by a main course of rissoles, boiled chicken or fish, and a vegetable, with a sweet at meal’s end.
Mar’iushka’s extended family was awash with ne’er-do-well, ailing, and often alcoholic men whose wives and daughters desperately needed work. One of them, Mar’iushka’s niece Masha, became the Pavlovs’ housemaid. Fifteen or sixteen years old, “very careful, hardworking, and gentle,” she became the object of Serafima’s pedagogical efforts. Serafima always offered to teach family servants reading, writing, and arithmetic—and Masha took to her studies with particular enthusiasm and success. Serafima was particularly proud of her poems, one of which affectionately portrayed the family’s passionate and irascible patriarch. Like Vasilii and Ivan Shuvalov, Masha became very dear to the Pavlovs—her premature death of typhus was a family tragedy.7
Deeply shaken by the loss of her first child, Serafima described herself as an “extremely fearful mother.” She protected her children from infectious diseases by keeping them away from others, so they spent their early years surrounded by adults and the children of a few trusted relatives and friends. The family’s first nanny, Elena Korotkova, was a distant cousin of Pavlov’s and, like all the family servants, deeply religious. Together with family friends and physicians Nikolai Viazhlinskii and David Kamenskii, she saw Serafima through her offspring’s childhood illnesses, always “trying not to alarm I. P. and not to distract him from his scientific work.” After Korotkova’s departure in 1902, the Pavlovs hired a series of governesses chosen for their native language (first for German, then for French).8
Relations between the parents and children were respectful, loving, and—especially between mother and children—warm. Pavlov’s cousin, who lived with the family for five years, testified that he never witnessed a single family quarrel, and that the family enjoyed lively discussions of a wide range of subjects over dinner. “The father’s love for his children was manifest in everything, but always calmly, evenly, without ‘nannying,’ without the show of excess caresses and kisses.”9 The only memoir by a Pavlov child—Vera’s lyrical account of dacha life at Sillamiagi—attests to her respect and affection for her mother and father (with some emotional distance from the latter). When the children traveled, they wrote home constantly.
“With God’s help,” Serafima recalled, “our children grew up honorable, hardworking, and truthful. They all were capable, studied easily and freely, and brought Ivan Petrovich neither worries nor troubles.” When questioned by a eugenicist about family traits, Pavlov identified strong analytical abilities in his three sons (pointedly excluding his daughter), and he delighted in Vsevolod’s slovotvorchestvo—his creative way with words. As Vera’s memoirs testify, she, too, had a gift for expressing herself, and she would later work skillfully, if erratically, as a coworker in her father’s lab. By her looks, high-strung temperament, and frequent nervous complaints, she was clearly her father’s daughter.10
All four children were serious and successful students in gymnasium: Vladimir, Vera, and Viktor each graduated with a gold medal; Vsevolod earned only the silver, which his mother attributed to his willful practice of studying only those subjects that interested him. The boys all adopted their father’s love of gymnastics, bicycling, and gorodki. Vera, too, became a devoted bicyclist, but gymnastics and gorodki were male sports and off limits to her. Vladimir and Vera took piano lessons, and two children also studied dance with a neighbor who performed at the Mariinskii Theater. At age seventeen, the oldest, Vladimir, gave his parents at least one traumatic night— drinking himself unconscious at a party and not returning home until morning—but this episode remained memorable because such bad moments were extremely rare.11
The second son, Viktor, was the clear favorite, a “rare child” with an “unusually soft and tender character.” Serafima noted proudly that his honesty and quietly strong character made him the moral authority among his peers, and Pavlov observed delightedly that he was extremely bright with a phenomenal memory (like his own). An outstanding student, Viktor, other children joked, seemed to have “been born literate.” Alone among the children, he overcame his father’s wish to garden alone at Sillamiagi, establishing himself as his assistant (as had Ivan in his father’s orchard in Riazan).12
During holidays, the children delighted in the company of their uncle Dmitrii. While their father was intense, serious, and authoritarian, Dmitrii was a warm jester and merrymaker. A gifted raconteur and charming conversationalist (in his presence, even his sharp-witted brother was noticeably silent), Dmitrii remained, in the 1890s, an adjunct professor of chemistry at the Novo-Alexandriiskii Institute of Agriculture and Forestry. Lacking his older brother’s drive and self-discipline, he had never justified the high hopes he had encouraged during his years as Mendeleev’s assistant. Vera later recalled that their bachelor uncle “loved and spoiled” them, distributing the candy he kept in his pockets; taking them to the circus, theater, and opera; and chasing them around the apartment, roaring like a big bad bear.13
The Pavlovs’ existence revolved around the patriarch’s long days at work, but included a rich circle of friends and family. Three couples were especially close: physician David Kamenskii, who was Pavlov’s assistant in the Department of Pharmacology at the Military-Medical Academy, and his wife Kiechka (Evdokiia Prokopovich), Serafima’s old friend from Berdiansk; Viktor Dobrovol’skii, physician and professor of eye diseases at the Academy, and his wife, Vera; and Ekaterina Shumova-Simanovskaia and her husband, professor and otolaryngologist Nikolai Simanovskii.14
Serafima’s description of Vera Dobrovol’skaia captures much of the tone of the Pavlov household:
This woman became our family’s protecting angel, so much did she love and concern herself with our children. She not only played with and read to them, but also told them many stories about her life, about gentle relations with people....She and I had grown close based upon our both having taken upon ourselves all the details and petty troubles of life in order to give our husbands the opportunity to immerse themselves exclusively in scientific work. Once, when I was disturbed by great troubles and prepared to turn for support to my husband, she restrained me from this imprudent step, indicating how difficult this would be for him and how he would come to pay attention to every occurrence in life, which would disturb his peaceful pursuit of his scientific work—“and you know that in this resides the entire goal of your life.”15
Pavlov also kept in close touch with his friends from Riazan: Nikolai Terskii, who was making his way up the bureaucratic ladder within the Ministry of Transportation; Nikolai Bystrov, who now served as the administrative secretary of the Senate’s Criminal Court of Appeals; and Ivan Chel’tsov, a chemistry teacher at the Kronstadt Naval Academy and inventor of a new smokeless gunpowder for the military. During the 1890s, he also formed a new set of friendships among the artists and scientists who summered at Sillamiagi, including his closest friend, the artist Nikolai Dubovskoi.
Close to Dmitrii, Pavlov was distant from his other siblings and parents. He rarely saw his sister, Lidiia, who had married a prominent cleric and lived in Moscow, or his parents and brother Sergei, who remained in Riazan. Pavlov spoke warmly of his mother, but his relations with his father remained cold and distant. Petr Dmitrievich and Varvara Ivanovna were apparently not welcome at the Pavlovs’ homes in Petersburg and Sillamiagi, nor did they enjoy any relationship with their grandchildren. In the 1890s, Pavlov visited Riazan only for his mother’s funeral in 1897 and his father’s two years later. At that time, he and Dmitrii pulled the necessary strings to have their younger brother, Sergei, appointed priest at Petr Dmitrievich’s Lazarevskaia Church. By doing so—and by renouncing their shares of their father’s estate—they left the troubled Sergei well established. This would be Pavlov’s last trip to Riazan for thirty-six years.16
“As a physiologist,” Pavlov once explained to a coworker, he understood the need for the harmonious development of “the centers of intellectual and physical labor.... When I, being very irritated and disturbed during an experiment, sit down to muscular work and begin stroking an animal’s fur while performing artificial respiration, I calm down quickly.... Obviously, balance is restored.”17
This “physiological conviction” reflected Pavlov’s values and life history: by enforcing a strict regimen that combined mental and physical labor, his godfather had revived the injured boy’s body and mind, and in his boyhood thereafter he had enjoyed physical labor in his father’s orchard. “With me, putting life on a desirable footing has always begun with pravil’nyi and systematic physical labor,” he had told Serafima during one of his many failed attempts to discipline himself. Now, as in other areas of his life, he began living by the principles he had long espoused, establishing a permanent place in his daily and annual routines for physical exercise. “I have always been an advocate, a lover of physical work.” he later proclaimed, “And I know from my own experience how well it works. I remember many difficult life situations and can say with complete conviction that physical work saved me when my nerves and mind were utterly disoriented. And I think that one way to escape a difficult nervous state is to incorporate physical work into life.”18
His favorite sport, gorodki, required a large field and was more appropriate to dacha life outside the city, so during his annual nine months in St. Petersburg, his main physical exercise was daily brisk walking and gymnastics. In the 1890s, he was the mainstay and president of the Physicians’ Athletic Society. That society, which met for much of the decade in the gym of the Admiralty building on the bank of the Neva River, initially had few members, but Pavlov dragooned his coworkers into the weekly evening sessions that he called “days of muscular joy.”
He tackled gymnastics with his usual passion and intrusive self-assertiveness. “One had to see how, lively and serious, Ivan Petrovich gave himself up to this,” recalled one participant, “and we were infected by his mood.” Some, perhaps, were inspired—but gymnastics with the chief was hardly carefree exercise and entertainment, nor even independent self-improvement. If a participant appeared a few minutes late or wanted to leave early, Pavlov became furious. He exercised strict control over the order in which participants performed exercises, rated each according to his own mock Table of Ranks (the official Table of Ranks, established by Peter the Great, defined Russians’ official status in life), and responded uninhibitedly to gymnasts’ performance: “Every successful routine elicited his encouragement, but failure brought with it ‘disgrace’ and laughter,” one gymnast recalled. The clumsy and the adroit were all rewarded with an appropriate nickname from the gymnast-in-chief.19
The Sunday card games of durachki were equally serious fare. Pavlov began these regular games after his return from Germany in 1886, and they became increasingly more systematized over the years. In the 1890s, the regular players were Serafima and two physician friends, Nikolai Viazhlinskii and David Kamenskii. By virtue of his phenomenal memory, Pavlov was frequently victorious—and always extremely competitive. The games were stormy, and a losing night sent him frequently into a “terrible rage.”20
Several times a year, Pavlov arrived late at the lab with a special spring in his step. He had spent the morning at an art exhibit, most frequently one featuring the paintings of Russia’s peredvizhniki, who took their name, “Travelers,” from their practice of staging exhibits throughout the city and country beyond traditional elite venues. These exhibits were major events in Pavlov’s life. He awaited them impatiently, studied the paintings attentively, and talked animatedly about their virtues and defects for a long time thereafter.21
Like Pavlov’s interest and orientation in science, the Travelers’ roots were in the social, cultural, and intellectual ferment of the 1860s. Just as the “people of the sixties” had criticized established Russian science for its philosophical idealism and distance from real nature, so the first generation of Travelers rejected the formalism of established Russian art and its monotonous attention to scenes drawn from the Bible and ancient history. In their landscape, portrait, and genre paintings, they portrayed recognizable scenes from Russian life and nature, combining a realistic style, democratic sentiments, and an emotional attachment to their homeland. Il’ia Repin’s Volga Boatmen is probably the work in this tradition best known in the West. Just as Pisarev and his allies had urged the popularization of science, so the Travelers—by their style and their traveling exhibitions—sought to make theirs an art for the broader public.
By the time Pavlov befriended Dubovskoi in the early 1890s, the Travelers (again, like Pavlov and many other scientists of his generation) had passed from their rebellious youth to a respectably establishment middle age. By the late 1870s, realist art (like materialism and positivism in science) had lost its perceived organic connection to radical sentiments and social change. Tsar Alexander III, a committed patron of the arts, embraced the Travelers as creators of a genuine Russian school expressing his own conservative nationalism. He purchased many of their canvases, restored their subsidies at the Academy of Arts, and preserved their work in what is today St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum. Pavel Tret’iakov, one of the new generation of wealthy Muscovite entrepreneurs, also combined political conservatism with an appreciation for these paintings, which he sponsored, purchased, and preserved in the Tret’iakov Gallery. By the end of the century, a growing number of upper-middle-class Russians attended the expanding system of galleries and exhibits, engaged to some degree in art collecting, and particularly appreciated the Travelers’ comprehensible and often nostalgic portrayals of Russian life. Many Travelers thus became quite wealthy. Their aging movement by then represented establishment conservatism in art, in sharp contrast with such Silver Age artists as Valentin Serov and the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group, whose works eschewed stories for the simple expression of beauty through color and the play of light.22
Pavlov fit snugly into this social profile of enthusiasts for the Travelers. A fervent advocate of realism who rejected impressionism, cubism, and other “artificial” trends as a matter of principle, he was emotionally attached to “pure Russian art,” which was for him a vehicle for reliving satisfying emotional experiences from his youth, telling stories about Russian life, expressing his values, and even illustrating scientific truths. Among his favorites were Levitan’s Eternal Peace, which resonated with his feelings for the Russian countryside, and Repin’s Volga Boatmen, which established him in Pavlov’s estimation as “the Tolstoy of painting. He understands great spiritual suffering.”
He was not yet a collector. By the turn of the century, however, two paintings by Travelers, each rich with personal meaning, hung on the Pavlovs’ living room wall. One, a gift from its creator, Dubovskoi, was a Sillamiagi scene; the other, Pavlov’s first art purchase, was Nikolai Yaroshenko’s portrait of Vladimir. Having met the oldest Pavlov son as a five- or six-year-old, Yaroshenko had been enchanted by his looks. When the artist died in 1898, Pavlov bought the portrait from his widow for 500 rubles. Serafima splurged on fine frames for each.23
A prospering family, domestic comfort, interesting friends, bracing physical exercise, and art—these, for Pavlov, were important parts of the good life, and his life was indeed quite good in the 1890s. Yet they functioned primarily as sources of support and balance for that which was most essential—his science. And for him in the 1890s, that science proved not merely good, but thrilling.