For nine months every year, Pavlov lived single-mindedly for his science; during the three summer months he lived, no less single-mindedly, another life—dacha life. When May drew to a close and exams at the Military-Medical Academy ended, he boarded a train at St. Petersburg’s Baltic Station and settled in for a journey of just over 100 miles to the southwest through thick pine forests and past countless rural churches. The trip took four and a half hours, because the train made twenty stops before reaching the Gulf of Finland, traveling along its southern coast past the great port at Narva, traversing the border between the St. Petersburg and Estonian districts of the tsarist empire, and finally arriving at Vaivara Station. From here it was but a short walk to his beloved dacha, where his family waited.
By the late nineteenth century, the dacha was a venerated part of Russian life. The virtues of rural air, soil, water, and rhythms were generally acknowledged as necessary palliatives for the stresses of city life upon the human organism during what was commonly termed “the nervous century.” Pavlov himself once put it this way: “Even the simple mechanism of clocks requires a rest, after which they run much better. All the more so with such a complex organism as a human.”1
During the 1880s, the Pavlovs had found summer refuge at the dachas of Serafima’s relatives; in 1890, when their financial position finally permitted, they made finding their own summer home a top priority. Here they would spend a quarter of each year—three months organized not around the demands of work and other duties, but rather around personal enjoyment and restoration. Their choice, then, reflected much about the couple’s—and particularly, of course, its patriarch’s—vision of summer pleasure.
St. Petersburgers seeking a summer residence usually chose among three dacha regions. Those with modest resources or continuing obligations in the city rented a shack or cottage in the city suburbs. Here, usually in humble circumstances, summer residents (dachniki) played out the scenes so familiar to readers of Anton Chekhov’s many stories about dacha life. Chekhov’s characters loved their dachas, but were rarely successful in their quest for rural relaxation amid crowded conditions, the constant visits of relatives and friends, and continual trips back to the city for work and supplies. Other St. Petersburgers took the Finnish Railroad north, summering in the Grand Duchy of Finland (with its border only ten miles from the Russian capital).
A third route to summer pleasure lay along the recently completed Baltic Railroad. In this direction, too, the nearest locations were the least desirable. More adventurous and prosperous Petersburgers traveled farther west—or, much better still, to the Narva region, on the border of today’s Russia and Estonia, with its lovely surroundings on the Gulf of Finland.
The Narva region had been settled by Estonians in the early thirteenth century and controlled successively by the Dutch, the Livonian Order, the state of Muscovy, and Sweden until it became part of the Russian Empire in 1704 as a result of Peter the Great’s successful war against the warrior-king of Sweden, Charles XII. One of the region’s towns (now Narva-Jõesuu, Estonia) was said to have earned the name Gungenburg (Hungry City) from the inability of the conquering tsar to obtain a decent meal there. Because of its strategic importance, the port city of Narva remained a fortress town under military control until the 1860s. With the economic reforms of that decade, restrictions were eased; industries grew on the basis of the region’s natural resources, water power, and hardworking population; and the port became a flourishing center of trade. In the 1870s, entrepreneurs and landowners began to develop the area as a dacha region, promoting its healthy climate and soil, its beaches on the Gulf, and its beautiful scenery to attract summer residents from Petersburg and Moscow. “Having the sea on one side and the woods on the other, Narva offers the advantages and comforts of each,” wrote one physician who owned a hydropathy station and sanatorium there. “The pure air of its seashore and forests, the relative peace and absence of noise, and the opportunity for swimming in the sea allow exhausted people to refresh themselves and to restore, so to speak, their strength for the entire year to come.”2
The curative powers of the seaside were well known, and few would dissent from the list of its blessings offered in the Guidebook to Dacha Regions, Hydropathic Institutions and Sea Bathing in the St. Petersburg Suburbs along the Finland and Baltic Railways (1889): “Sea bathing successfully treats: anemia from the direct loss of blood, from the faulty assimilation of nutritive substances, from excessive intellectual and physical labors, or from a life full of worries; anemia and muscular weakness, resulting from wasting illnesses and also moderate sclerosis.... Sea air and sea bathing have a favorable effect on so-called nervous weakness (neurasthenia), on apathy and exhaustion caused by physical and emotional adversities; atony of the stomach, intestines,...and uterus; hysterical paralysis, incontinence, involuntary seminal emissions, and early impotence.”3 As a scientist, physician, and lecturer on balneology and hydrotherapy at the Military-Medical Academy, Pavlov, too, firmly believed in the special curative qualities of sea air, once explaining that “when his children had caught cold at the seaside he had treated them [only] with a children’s balsam prepared according to his mother’s recipe, since the air at the seaside is clean, there are no microbes there, and so the children were in no danger.”4
Guidebooks agreed that the Estonian side of the Narva region was superior to the St. Petersburg side. Easily accessible by railroad, it offered a healthier climate, soil, and beaches and was serviced by an industrious local population. The local Estonian peasants sometimes rented land from the landowners over the summer, turning a profit by building and renting dachas and by supplying summer residents with food and other products.5
The various locales in the Narva region had distinctive personalities. The two most popular were Merrekiul and Gungenburg. Merrekiul (now Meriküla, Estonia) was the region’s traditional dacha center. Even before completion of the Baltic Railway, dachniki seeking the benefits of fresh sea air had arrived there by carriage. By the time the Pavlovs began searching for a summer home, nearby Gungenburg had emerged as a popular rival. Although its beaches were sandier (and so less convenient for strolling), Gungenburg offered a much wider range of living quarters and activities. A summer population of about 7,000 streamed into its dachas, boarding houses, and hotels, which combined the amenities of a modern city with an appealing seaside setting. Gungenburg’s dachniki could enjoy a dance hall, orchestra, theatre, and library; dine at a wide variety of restaurants; practice gymnastics; soothe their nerves in a modern hydropathic facility; attend one of several churches; and enroll their children in courses. Yet, having become fashionable, Gungenburg required dachniki to observe a “certain etiquette, and so those who are fed up with city life, lovers of quiet and solitude, prefer to spend their summer in the bosom of nature in quieter corners.”
Nearby Monplezir offered one such “quieter corner” and a more upscale, private summer life. Here dachniki resided in large homes with fenced-in grounds that led down to the sea—providing each with its own park. A “wonderful place,” noted one guide to the region, but not ideal for the carefree stroller, since the grounds were marked by no-trespassing signs and one had to make one’s way carefully around fences, “risking a confrontation with a large, mean dog.”6
Eschewing the large resort towns of Merrekiul and Gungenburg as well as the elite Monplezir, the Pavlovs chose the smaller, quieter, and relatively little-known Sillamiagi (now Sillamäe, Estonia), and, after two summers there, moved across the Sotke River to its remote corner, Tiursel. They summered in that same dacha for twenty-six years—from 1892 through 1917. “We became accustomed to that place,” Serafima later recalled, “and loved it as our dear home.”7 (Since they constituted a single community, residents referred synonymously to Sillamiagi and Tiursel.)
Officially designated a “therapeutic locale” by virtue of its healthy climate, Sillamiagi had long attracted successful poets, artists, scholars, and scientists. Composer Petr Tchaikovsky had summered there in earlier years, and its dachniki in the 1890s included poet Viacheslav Ivanov and two members of the Academy of Sciences, botanist Andrei Famintsyn and philologist Vasilii Latyshev. By the early 1890s (whether before or after the Pavlovs’ arrival is unclear), some of the family’s closest personal friends also resided in the area: Pavlov’s old friend from Riazan—and by 1904, vice-director of the Ministry of Transportation—Nikolai Terskii lived either in Sillamiagi or nearby; close family friend and St. Petersburg University histologist Alexander Dogel’ resided with his family in Gungenburg; and Serafima’s sister Taisiia summered in Sillamiagi with her husband, noted jurist Fedor Dobuzhinskii.
Sillamiagi offered “no amusements”—only a simple kursaal (a public room), a post office and pharmacy, a small bakery and candy shop.8 It attracted those who sought the inspiration, peace, and healthfulness of a beautiful natural setting and a respite from the complexity of city life among a small, self-selected circle of the intelligentsia. “Totally charming,” recalled one resident artist. “Tall pine trees, the scent of resin, the rustling of grass under one’s feet, the noise of the gray sea.”9
The largest of the ten dachas in Tiursel, which belonged to a certain Waldman, served as the Pavlovs’ summer home. A spacious, two-story wooden structure built in the early nineteenth century, it still contained some of the original redwood furniture. The white-columned veranda that faced to the south became the dacha’s good-weather social center, offering a long dining table, a round table, and a couch (where Pavlov often sat or lay, drinking tea and reading a book).
A samovar steamed there constantly from lunchtime until about 5:00. When the weather was cold or rainy, or the Pavlovs were entertaining guests, they ate just off the veranda in the dining room with its antique wooden furniture. Off the dining room radiated Ivan and Serafima’s bedroom, another bedroom for their oldest son, Vladimir, and a small room with a triangular wooden buffet. Unlike family practice in the city, this buffet remained unlocked, so the children could always find there something interesting to eat. To the right of the buffet was the bedroom for the younger children, a guest room (often occupied by Serafima’s mother), and a storage area with a cold room. Here accumulated the jars of jam that the family made over the summer and stored for their months in the city. Down a small staircase were the kitchen and servants’ room. The family cook Mar’iushka lived here, along with two other servants whose identity changed with the children’s age: a nanny and a governess responsible for language instruction. The dacha’s second floor was a large attic, and at its far end was the guest room invariably occupied in the 1890s by Pavlov’s brother Dmitrii. Another frequent lodger was a good friend’s son, artist Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, who later described Serafima as “the kindest person, with dimpled cheeks and pretty eyes” and her husband as “a grumbler, constantly swearing in his ardors.”10
A great boon to the local economy, dachniki were serviced constantly by the local inhabitants. Provisions were brought to their doorstep by a series of colorful characters who lived in the children’s memories for years thereafter. In her memoir of dacha life, Vera described them vividly. The first to arrive in the mornings was the molochnitsa—a robust woman bearing milk and buckets of sour cream and cottage cheese (tvorog). Shortly thereafter came the “cheerful cry ‘rolls,’” and the bulochnik would appear, bearing on his head a large basket covered with a white tablecloth. Putting his basket down on the steps of the door to the kitchen corridor, he displayed an alluring variety of rolls. The consistent family favorite was the “delightful zavarnye baranki” (bagel-like rolls made from boiled dough), which were often still warm and covered with melting butter. Perfect for morning tea. The bulochnik also took orders for cookies and cakes. After the bulochnik usually followed the butcher on his horse. Serafima and Mar’iushka would meet him with basket in hand, conferring about the day’s offerings while the children gathered round, feeding the horse grass and sugar. After mother had made her purchases, the children would climb aboard, riding with the butcher as he made his rounds.
Another daily visitor was the fisherman who brought to the house his trademark sprats. Vera recalled that “Everybody highly valued this marvelous fish, from which we prepared a very simple meal consisting of alternate layers of the sprats and pieces of cut potato stewed in the stove.” The Pavlovs often brought baskets of them back to the city. The fisherman cut a romantic figure for the children—first, because he ignored them; second, because of his mysterious secret for making the tastiest sprats (speculation had it that he used particular branches of the juniper for smoking), and, finally, because he was legless (but getting around “very smartly” on his wooden stump). Accompanied by their nanny, the children often visited his hut in a nearby village, peering into the smoking shed, where “it smelled good and where, in tidy rows, hung the golden fish strung on a rail.”
The last daily provisioner would arrive at about 4:00 selling special “Vyborgskii biscuits” for late afternoon tea. Other vendors appeared only on appointed days of the week: one brought potatoes and vegetables, berries, honey, and jam; another sold a rich assortment of fish, milk products, fruit and vegetables. By Mar’iushka’s special order, the kolbasnik from a nearby town sometimes appeared, bearing on his light brown horse all sorts of cold aromatic meats, including an especially memorable liver sausage and ham, and wheels of Russian, Estonian, and Dutch cheese.11
Family members arose at different times, breakfasted on the veranda when they chose, and apparently went about their activities pretty much as they pleased—with the young children under the supervision of a nanny, or bonna, and a governess—but gathered for obed (dinner, the most substantial meal of the day) at precisely 12:30, tea at 4:00, and uzhin (supper) at 8:00. The family patriarch approached dacha life as he did everything else—systematically. During their first summers at Sillamiagi, Serafima observed, he concentrated upon “the construction and systematization of our life” and “pravil’nyi allocation of time.” He adopted a strict, unvarying schedule featuring constant physical exercise as he sought to bring his organism into balance after the strenuous mental demands of his work months in Petersburg, to experience what he referred to as “muscular joy,” and to relive memories of his physically active youth in Riazan.12
From his boyhood days, Pavlov had enjoyed working on the land and gardening, and his day began with two hours of this labor of love. In the front of their dacha was a small parcel of land ending in large jasmine bushes. To their left were two paths—one, narrow and overgrown, leading down three long sets of wooden steps to the Gulf of Finland; the other winding around the rear of the house. He decided that his first task was to make these paths fully serviceable, so he set about clearing them by hand and road-scraper, marking their borders with twine. Then, usually first thing in the morning, he built them up with sand that he lugged up in pails, two at a time, from the beach.
The climb from the Gulf to the dacha was long, uphill, and difficult. Vera recalled that, although her mother was busy with household affairs, disliked physical labor, and was “rather plump,” her father insisted that helping him lug the pails to his garden would be good for her health. “This they did early, before morning tea, while the weather was still cool. One of father’s visitors captured this activity on film, from which it is evident how voluminous was the pail that mother used.... Such are its dimensions that it makes me ponder the difference in physical strength between that generation and ours. Another observer was struck “on the one hand, by the apparently low efficiency of [Pavlov’s] work”—dragging sand in pails up from below, a very difficult task demanding great physical effort—“and, on the other, the remarkable joyfulness and energy of the man doing the work.”13
The flower garden became Pavlov’s pride and joy, and here he preferred to work alone, though he finally bowed to Viktor’s persistent entreaties to serve as assistant. Already in February and March, when Petersburg was still wintry, his thoughts turned toward the upcoming summer’s gardening. He ordered seeds from Riga and planted them, first in pots, then in long oblong containers that filled the window boxes of the apartment. He carefully thinned them himself, using tools built to his specification by his dexterous cousin Alexander. In May, he traveled to the dacha on weekends, transporting his precious boxes there in a strictly determined order and returning home stiff, stooped, and content.14
During the summer, he rose early for two hours’ work in the flower beds. He had always found it difficult to lean over, so he planted flowers while on his knees, resting on a pillow stuffed with hay to avoid contracting rheumatism from the damp morning soil. He labored energetically, working up such a sweat that he usually changed his soaked shirt twice every morning. Among Vera’s lasting summer memories were her father’s pillow drying in the sun, and the unchanging outfit in which he gardened—the gray-blue shirt with outturned collar, black or gray pants, and gray cap, which he exchanged in sunny weather for a wide-brimmed straw hat.15
Pavlov’s garden began with beds of nasturtiums, first at the base of the veranda and extending over the years around its white columns and along both sides of the stairs. Other flowers followed, including his own favorite, the carnation. Under the window of his and Serafima’s bedroom, he planted a triangular bed of roses (her favorite), which prospered in their sunny, protected spot. The garden grew constantly—roses around the spruce tree on the west side of the veranda, asters in the shade on its east, various bushes and asters around the dacha’s large pine tree, and, finally, row after row of flowers along the unused road that ran past the grounds. Every September, the family brought a rich harvest of fresh flowers back with them to the city. In this, however, Pavlov participated only reluctantly. “Father loved flowers,” Vera later recalled, and “he didn’t like to pick them, doing so only rarely and without great enthusiasm.”
The only source of water for this extensive garden was the river, which flowed some distance from the dacha, down about twenty wooden steps along a long crooked path. To Serafima’s good fortune, her husband refused all assistance while lugging buckets of river water uphill. “He considered carrying the buckets to be a useful activity, and always energetically and decisively rejected any offers...of assistance. Everybody gradually became accustomed to the sight of father working, and nobody living in the neighborhood disturbed his established order.” When these labors were completed, he would join his family for morning tea, and “would rest, strolling and admiring his work.”16
According to his strict schedule, the half-hour teatime was followed immediately by a game of gorodki. Its origins shrouded in the distant folk past, gorodki had long been the most popular sport in Russia (though it was losing ground to tennis among Sillamiagi youth). It was the common passion of Tsar Peter the Great, the renowned general Alexander Suvorov (who required his soldiers to play as part of their training), writer Leo Tolstoy (whose gorodki court at his estate in Yasnaya Polyana is preserved to this day), and the operatic basso Fedor Chaliapin. The last tsar, Nicholas II, played gorodki with his family, as did Stalin with his protégé Sergei Kirov in later years. Pavlov had been a devotee from boyhood, and, by all accounts, excelled at the game. (He still played vigorously, aggressively, and well at age eighty-five.)
Gorodki resembles skittles and bowling. Players throw a wooden bat (bita) about a yard long at a set of three figures, each composed of five oblong wooden blocks, called gorodki, that are arranged in various formations in a four- or six-meter-square section of the far court known as the gorod (literally “city”)—which, perhaps, took its name from the fortified hamlets in which Cossacks traditionally lived. The goal is to knock these pieces out of the gorod in as few throws as possible. Good play requires strength, coordination, aim, and tactical thinking.
The members of Pavlov’s gorodki club initially played on the path in front of his veranda, but as Pavlov’s expanding garden displaced them and membership grew, he organized the players to construct a court on the cooler northern side of the dacha. The vacationers dug a large, extended rectangular hole fifteen meters long and filled it with layers of stone, sand, and gravel that they hauled up from the Gulf and tamped down firmly. They surrounded the court with trees and bushes, and built benches for the players. Pavlov saw to it that the court was tended scrupulously, watered in dry weather and sprinkled with sand when it rained. At exactly 10:30 a.m., some twenty or twenty-five men and boys assembled for the game. Women, of course, did not play, nor were they particularly welcome to sit on the sidelines. An occasional exception was Vera, who recorded that “The men felt themselves freer and more at ease without observers. Enthusiasm for the game was very strong, passions flared, and the atmosphere became heated.”17
Pavlov dominated. Not only was he the game’s organizer and referee, he was a superb player. “Father distinguished himself by his great accuracy and played powerfully, easily, and beautifully.” Another observer noted that Pavlov, like his entire family, was “distinguished by great strength” and that he was “unbeaten” at gorodki; yet another that “he excelled.”18
Vera omitted another lifelong characteristic of her father’s play: as in gymnastics, he maintained a constant commentary on the performance of others—praising, teasing, and riding players, often assigning them nicknames that expressed his assessment of their strengths or weaknesses.19 Lev Orbeli played once, but declined to repeat the experience “because the game proceeded with such terrible ardor, with wrangling, mainly between Ivan Petrovich and his sons.” Serafima once had to calm down the family cook, who was convinced the men were going to kill each other.20
A good game required evenly matched teams, so Pavlov organized tournaments at the end of each summer to rank the new players. He often awarded prizes for outstanding performance. In later years, as the players’ offspring came of age, the opposing teams were organized into “fathers” and “children” (an allusion to Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Children about generational conflict in the 1860s). Through most of the 1900s and 1910s, Pavlov commanded the “fathers” while Vladimir led the “children” (who, in games of gorodki, were solely sons).
When the game ended at noon, Pavlov ducked into his dacha, emerging, well-brushed and combed, in his gorodki pants, jacket, and cap, with a shaggy white towel around his neck. Mounting his bicycle, he led the other players—who waited every day for him to complete this ritual—down to the Gulf for the “men’s swim.” He loved to swim in the sea, and did so through the end of August, when the water was already rather cold (about 57 degrees Fahrenheit), never missing a day regardless of wind, rain, or waves that sometimes knocked him off his feet.21 All dacha regions had prescribed times for men and women to swim, and Pavlov was an especially fervent stickler for the rules.22 Returning from the lake at 12:30—just as the bell from a nearby farm announced the dinner hour—he joined his family for the meal.
Afterward, he would lie on the couch on the veranda, drinking tea (six to ten glasses on a typical afternoon) and reading poetry, literature, or philosophy. During his nine months in the city, he read very little nonscientific literature, but he collected books for summer reading and received two each year by the family tradition of buying books for each other on birthdays and name days. In keeping with his notion of balance and restoration, Serafima explained, he “found it necessary to completely clear his head of any laboratory thoughts” during the summer, and brought no science books with him to the dacha.23 Yet his reading was hardly light fare. For example, in summer 1896 he read the collected works of materialist philosopher and literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov (a birthday gift that year) and John Stuart Mill’s autobiography (that year’s name day gift); in 1897 he read the collected works of his boyhood hero Dmitrii Pisarev (another name day gift) and those of sociologist and critic Nikolai Mikhailovskii (which he himself purchased that year); and in 1898 he lay on the divan with that year’s birthday gift, the recent Russian translation of John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding.24
At 4:00, the family gathered for coffee. After downing three or four glasses with a pastry, Pavlov waited for his companions to gather again, this time for a long bicycle expedition. Cycling came into vogue in Russia at the turn of the century, and in 1898 Pavlov purchased his own simple and sturdy German bicycle. He bought the four children their own bicycles for family expeditions and sought Serafima’s participation as well, but, as Vera recalled, encountered unyielding resistance:
With his characteristic enthusiasm and determination he undertook to reverse her disinclination toward bicycle riding. To this end, every day, at a strictly determined time, she set off [with Pavlov] reluctantly.... Mother was a plump woman, so it was not easy to support her. She returned home from each of these sessions in a rather flushed state and a not especially pleasant mood. Father was unyielding, and these sessions continued for some time without result. Finally, to mother’s great satisfaction, he admitted defeat. No new attempts were undertaken and father established the fact that there exists a category of people who are absolutely incapable in sports.25
The family expeditions (sans Serafima) soon swelled into a club with some fifteen enthusiasts. They embarked regularly on trips of as long as thirty miles, bicycling on the narrow cratered dirt tracks along both sides of the road. This could be treacherous, especially after it had rained. One English guest who accompanied them on a trek departed much impressed with the demanding native bicycling conditions—and muttering repeatedly that the sport must have been invented by Peter the Great (the tsar legendary for his physical strength). For Pavlov, vigorous physical exercise was precisely the point. When bicycle technology leapt forward with the invention of the free wheel (which permitted cyclists to glide without pedaling), he dismissed the innovation on principle: “You will ride by inertia, without working. Why ride on a bicycle if not to work?!” Vladimir’s desire to purchase a model with this device precipitated a heated quarrel.26
Pavlov of course set the rules. He rode in an “extraordinarily measured manner, with a very subtly developed sense of rhythm,” Vera observed, and “didn’t permit very fast riding or any other show-off behavior, considering all this highly undignified.”27
The trips usually lasted from about 5:00 to 8:00 in the evening, and were of course well planned, with various stops along the way. On the eastward route, Vera recalled, they traveled along the gulf for about seven miles before swinging south to snack at the café Mustakonda. There, in a spacious enclosed garden and lively bee farm, they drank aromatic coffee, devoured the house specialty of honey shortbread, and completed their snack with fresh berries. Farther along the road to Narva lay another café, the Anelie, which offered a spectacular view of the gulf and the port city, and where they might have coffee and cake. When they reached their destination, Gungenburg, the cyclists each went their own way, meeting later at an appointed place and time. They returned home at about 8:00 for a light supper of cheese and sausage.28
The evenings were often devoted to stargazing. Pavlov had been interested in astronomy since his seminary days, and the dark clear skies at Sillamiagi lent themselves to this hobby. One neighbor shared his interest and was armed with a good telescope, so they spent hours on the road in front of their dacha watching the stars. They were soon joined by a sizable community.29
Once in a while, Pavlov would stroll with Serafima or lead the family on berry and mushroom expeditions. For him, of course, even a stroll proved strenuous activity. Vera recalled of her parents’ strolls that “Father walked in long brisk steps, mother in short ones. As a result, he would pull ahead while she, in mincing steps, barely kept within range of him. He would stop and wait, they would walk for some time together, and then the same story would repeat itself.” Serafima, understandably, preferred to go for walks with her friends.30 Family expeditions began with the quest for wild strawberries at the end of May. This was serious business, Vera recalled: “We moved about with great concentration, and...in a determined order...visiting places that father had given various names commemorating the person who had first discovered them.” Pavlov loved jam—his favorite was cloudberry—and Serafima prepared it in great quantity from their gatherings. Together with marinated mushrooms and cucumbers, the jams were transported in carefully packed glass jars to St. Petersburg, where they provided “indispensable supplies” for their city life.31
Sillamiagi summers provided Pavlov with a different kind of social relationship than he had in St. Petersburg. During his nine months in the city, he had little time, energy, opportunity, or inclination for developing new friendships with peers, let alone with nonscientists. His contacts with other people were largely shaped by his single-minded devotion to his work, and his time outside of the lab, classroom, and academic meetings was spent in ways that sustained his torrid work pace: limited family time, evenings devoted to solitary study and planning the next day’s experiments, occasional visits from coworkers and friends, gymnastics with his subordinates, and games of durachki.
Dacha time was different. During the summer, Pavlov sought to balance his usual preoccupation with science through other activities—mostly physical, but also reading and long conversations. He happily engaged subjects unrelated to his research. Furthermore, here he was often surrounded by other successful professionals with developed interests, strong opinions, and wills of their own. Pavlov remained Pavlov—and in the summer, too, he maintained an unchanging routine and sometimes overbearing manner—but in the 1890s dacha life generated a broad circle of acquaintances, two close male friendships, and an increasingly serious interest in art.
His summer circle included the botanist and academician Vladimir Palladin and his son Alexander (the future president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, who cut a dashing figure as a poet within Vera’s circle); Alexander Dogel’ (already a close family friend) and his son Valentin (a gorodki enthusiast who often lived with the Pavlovs, and became an eminent professor of zoology at St. Petersburg University and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences); and two important jurists, Terskii and Serafima’s brother-in-law Fedor Dobuzhinskii. All of these figures, in turn, belonged to their own circles, to which Pavlov also was introduced during the summers.
The gorodki games attracted a number of artists, including two men who became Pavlov’s good friends, Richard Berggol’ts and Nikolai Dubovskoi. These friendships, born in the first years at Sillamiagi, engaged him in the issues being debated by Russia’s artists at the time, introduced him to the broader networks of St. Petersburg’s artistic community, and nurtured a lifelong passion for art.
Berggol’ts was a young, developing artist when he first met Pavlov. Still in his twenties, he had studied at the Arts Academy and in Paris and Naples, and had since 1887 contributed paintings (usually landscapes) to the exhibitions of the Travelers (peredvizhniki). He held strong views about the issues that animated Russian artists: the relationship of art to life and the proper place of nature and imagination in good art. The commonalities between these issues in art and in science fueled heated discussions on the veranda. Pavlov was not bashful about pressing his own views, and they argued constantly about the nature and significance of good art. For Pavlov, as his cousin recalled, the artist and scientist shared the same “true task”—to capture nature as it really is. “He couldn’t abide pictures, even Russian ones, created by various decadents, cubists, impressionists, and so forth.”32 Throughout the prewar years, Pavlov could enjoy the successes of his younger friend as Berggol’ts became both a member of the elite Arts Academy and president of the Travelers’ professional organization, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. Two of his paintings of Sillamiagi would eventually join Pavlov’s collection.
In summer 1892 or 1893, the renowned Traveler Nikolai Dubovskoi joined the gorodki games at Sillamiagi. Perhaps Berggol’ts introduced him, or perhaps it was Terskii, whose daughter married Dubovskoi in 1895. The painter soon became Pavlov’s closest friend, joining him for gorodki, bicycling, and conversation on the veranda; drawing the entire Pavlov family into St. Petersburg’s artistic milieu; and serving as Pavlov’s closest male confidante until their world was swept away in the aftermath of 1917.33
When the two first became friends, both were professionally successful, but the younger Dubovskoi was already famous. Their lives had, in a number of ways, moved along parallel tracks. The descendant of Don Cossacks, Dubovskoi had been born into a military family and, like Pavlov, was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Just as Pavlov had roused himself early every morning to indulge his growing interest in science while attending seminary, so had Dubovskoi awakened two hours early each day to draw while attending a military gymnasium. And just as Pavlov had abandoned the seminary over the protests of his father to study physiology at St. Petersburg University, so had Dubovskoi defied his father to study landscape painting at St. Petersburg’s Arts Academy.
Dubovskoi’s paintings depicted both enclosed, comfortable corners in nature and great, powerful expanses, bringing to each an emotional content expressing the human experience. He was especially drawn to the fleeting moments in nature that expressed its tensions, power, and volatility. These, one critic noted, he used for the expression of “the powerful feelings that involuntarily capture the viewer. A romantic sense is joined to the artist’s rhapsodic, enraptured view of the world.”34
Dubovskoi first attracted the attention of the art world in 1884 with his Zima (Winter), which was one of the first landscape paintings featuring the magisterial beauty of that Russian season. Two years later, the prominent businessman and art collector Pavel Tret’iakov purchased his Ranniaia Vesna (Early Spring). When Pritikhlo (It Has Calmed, 1890) was exhibited at the International Art Exhibit in Rome, Repin proudly pronounced it “the best landscape” on display there. In the 1890s, the “poet Dubovskoi” (as critic A. N. Benua christened him) produced a succession of powerful and critically acclaimed portrayals of Russian nature, including Raduga (Rainbow, 1893), Posle Buri (After the Storm, 1897), Proshel Uragan (The Hurricane has Passed, 1898), and then—in the view of many art critics, his most powerful, culminating work—Rodina (Homeland) in 1905.35 His reputation at this time rivaled that of such leading Travelers as Isaak Levitan and Apollinarii Vasnetsov.
Dubovskoi spent much of his time at Sillamiagi painting, and his oeuvre included numerous paintings of this dacha region. These paintings had special meaning for the Pavlov family, not only as a friend’s portrayal of their beloved summer home, but also because the young Vera and her friends were sometimes present at their creation. They often trailed after him as he identified and painted various scenes. Pavlov added two of these paintings—one of the woods in twilight, another of sailboats against the azure water—to his collection, where they served as a constant reminder of the family’s Sillamiagi summers and their special friend.36
Admitted to the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions in 1886, Dubovskoi was elected to the official Arts Academy in 1898 and became a full member in 1900. From 1899, he played an important role in organizational affairs—attempting to negotiate the growing differences within the aging Traveler movement and to incorporate the former rebels smoothly into the elite Academy.
Tall, with an expressive face and a soft, delicate nature—and subject, like Pavlov, to explosions of temper—Dubovskoi was, also like Pavlov, passionate and idealistic about his work. For each man, a deeply personal creative drive reinforced a belief in his work’s broader social significance—a belief born in the culture of the 1860s in which both Pavlov’s scientism and Dubovskoi’s Traveler values had their roots. For Pavlov, that faith resided in science’s mission to understand and control nature, including human nature; for Dubovskoi, in art’s capacity to bring out the best in people, and so to facilitate harmony among people and with nature. For Serafima, her husband had found another “pure, direct, elevated soul” who was “eternally searching for truth, attempting always to be just.”37 Also like Pavlov, Dubovskoi married a woman who made it her chief task in life to facilitate her husband’s work.
Dubovskoi summered in a peasant village some distance from Sillamiagi, but rarely missed a game of gorodki and usually joined the bicycle expeditions afterward, frequently remaining for long summer evenings at his friend’s dacha. Many were spent discussing art and science. They had each long since transcended the sterile arguments of their youth about the relative importance of these two endeavors. Pavlov had long ago abandoned his youthful conviction, with Pisarev, that backward Russia could not afford to waste its limited intellectual energies on art, and Dubovskoi regretted his lack of knowledge about science. That sentiment led him to organize musical evenings in St. Petersburg to bring together members of the artistic and scientific communities—evenings in which the Pavlovs participated enthusiastically.
Such were the rhythms and relations of the three idyllic months that Pavlov passed annually at Sillamiagi. Toward the end of August, as Vera observed, he “would begin to miss the laboratory, and, with great satisfaction, would return to the city.... There began the labor that would swallow all other interests until the next spring.”38