In the fall of 1912, a thirty-seven-year-old female physician, Maria Kapitonovna Petrova, approached Pavlov’s office at the IEM to confer about pursuing doctoral research in his lab. She was understandably nervous about the encounter. Petrova knew Pavlov’s reputation for being “extremely severe” with women, and while visiting a friend in Sillamiagi six years earlier she had witnessed one of his legendary explosions of temper as he berated a woman for picking a rose from his garden. She also feared that Pavlov had not forgiven her for an incident during that earlier visit: when one teammate in his treasured games of gorodki had vanished, Pavlov had tracked him down and discovered to his great annoyance that he had abandoned the sport to spend his afternoons instead courting Petrova. Pavlov had also seen her flirting with Kravkov at meetings of the Society of Russian Physicians. So she worried—and not without reason—that he considered her a frivolous “man-killer.”1
Yet their meeting went quite well. The chief was relaxed and more than friendly, complimenting her as a “lively, agile, enchanting, plump creature.” He was of course flirting—for him the adjective “plump” was positive. As he later explained to her: “I understand beauty according to Chernyshevskii and Schopenhauer. In order to be pleasing, a woman must be healthy, strapping, and blooming with a bright blush. She is intended to provide healthy offspring. She should have a broad waist to give birth well and a high breast in order to feed well.... I could not love a weak, pale, lean woman with a flat chest and a narrow waist. Physically, such a woman is unpleasant to me.” “In a word,” Petrova later explained approvingly, “his evaluation of female beauty was that of the true physiologist.”2
Shortly thereafter, she became a coworker; after a two-year lab courtship they became lovers, and for the last two decades of his life she was his most important coworker. The research to which he had always referred as “my mission” would, over time, at least in their private conversations, become “our mission,” and Pavlov’s “Kapitosha”—the affectionate diminutive by which his grandchildren came to know her—would also become, in the words of a leading scientist of the next generation, “the pride of Soviet physiology.”3
Maria Petrova was a very different woman than Serafima Pavlova. Both left extensive memoirs that offer rich detail about their lives and intimate moments with Pavlov. All memoirs, of course, represent selective narratives drawn from subjective, imperfect memories. Serafima’s is the story of her religious faith and fulfilling marriage to a great and good man, and an affirmation of her decision to devote herself to facilitating the fruition of his genius. Maria’s is the tale of a frivolous, privileged girl who was transformed by her devotion to two great men—first her husband and then Pavlov—into a substantial person, a loyal Soviet citizen, and an accomplished scientist. The greater part of her narrative is also intended to portray herself as the great scientist’s true love and most faithful disciple during his final decades.
Twenty-five years younger than Pavlov, she was born Maria Dobrovol’skaia in March 1874 in Tiflis, Georgia, which was part of the tsarist empire. Her father, Kapiton Dobrovol’skii, was a prosperous cleric and teacher in a local military middle school who had earned military honors for his participation in the conquest of the Caucasus. Her mother remained home to raise the children and pamper Maria, who became, as she later recalled, the “spoiled family favorite” and a healthy, lively child who sometimes suffered the consequences of “excessive pride.”4
When she was twelve, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where her father ministered to cavalry officers, first in an officers training school and finally in the elite Imperial Guard. In the capital, she completed gymnasium, took art lessons, and fell in love with the young cleric Grigorii Spiridonovich Petrov, whom she married at age sixteen.5 (She thus became Petrova—the feminine form of his family name.)
Petrov was just beginning a meteoric career as a controversial populist priest. Born to a peasant family in the village of Luga, about eighty-five miles south of St. Petersburg, he had, at age thirteen, set out for the capital, where he lived with relatives while studying for entrance to the Theological Seminary. Bright and well-spoken, he attracted the attention of influential church elders (including, perhaps, Maria’s well-connected father). They were married at about the time of his graduation from the Theological Academy in 1891, after which he was appointed religious teacher at the Mikhailovskoe Artillery School and senior priest of its church.
That church soon became the unlikely center of a citywide sensation as Petrov’s sermons attracted a diverse, standing-room-only audience. Eschewing traditional texts and explications of church doctrine, the charismatic priest offered instead a simple message based on Tolstoy and the Apostles. Contemporary civilization was Christian in name only, and in Russia genuine Christian morality was largely ignored or derided as utopian and prescientific. Many intellectuals sought their salvation in science, which, with its Darwinism and pessimism, could not lead to true moral progress. Only the Savior’s principles of love, justice, individual rights, and the quest for moral renovation could do that. As one admirer put it, Petrov issued an “exaltational call to our vacillating intelligentsia to turn toward the Apostles, to be permeated by their spirit, and on this basis, with their power, to build God’s Kingdom on earth.”6
His sermons on science, culture, industry, politics, and family enjoyed, according to one friendly contemporary biographer, a “colossal success,” attracting workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals “not previously interested in religious questions.”7 Petrov’s military flock listened to the priest from the distant corners of their church, which was occupied, as one observer recorded, by “intellectuals of various ages and ranks, impressively dressed women, the aroma of fashionable perfumes, and the dominance of the French language, creating the appearance of a high-society function.”8 Many turned to him for personal counseling and help, and he attracted a permanent group of disciples.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, Petrov also wrote popular inspirational books, including The Apostles as the Basis of Life (1898, subsequently twenty editions), In Christ’s Footsteps (ten editions), and School and Life (eight editions). He spoke frequently throughout the city and to higher aristocratic circles. Grand Dukes Pavel Aleksandrovich and Konstantin Konstantinovich invited him to supervise the moral upbringing of their children.
He also had powerful critics. Some found his preaching style overly smooth and affected (“perhaps too pretty”) and thought his adaptation of Christian teaching to everyday life offered a bit too much “milk” and too little “solid food.”9 Leading figures in the Holy Synod—including its head procurator from 1880 to 1905, the tsar’s close advisor Konstantin Pobedonostsev—criticized Petrov’s version of Russian Orthodoxy as demagogic, radical, protestant, and only superficially grounded in church doctrine. Some wanted him defrocked, and in 1901 Petrov was warned to cease his commentaries on public affairs. Yet he prospered in the years before the 1905 revolution, becoming famous not only among all strata of Petersburg society, but even in the provinces—and also quite wealthy.10
Petrova later described her first years of married life as a comfortable, empty-headed idyll that “passed happily and without a care. My husband and parents spoiled me; I was more than provided for materially. Life was one long holiday. My husband looked upon me as a happy favorite child and, himself working much, did not interfere with my empty carefree life. Balls, theater, concerts continued without pause.... I delighted in life and fluttered about like a butterfly.” Growing weary of this empty life, she decided that she wanted a child and, at age nineteen, in the third year of her marriage, she gave birth to a son, Boris, who “swallowed up my entire existence.” When Boris left for boarding school in Zurich—and with her husband constantly busy and traveling—she again grew bored and restless.11
Her husband’s religious-political activities attracted a broad circle of followers, some of whom met regularly at the Petrovs’ home. Medical students and physicians, students at the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses, engineers, and writers gathered to discuss literature, theology, and the pressing issues of the day. Petrova later recalled that she was struck by the difference between their “real life” and hers. “I wanted passionately not to be a parasite, as I had been up to that time, and to become a real helpmate and friend to my much beloved husband, to live his interests and share his griefs and joys.”12
Seven years into their marriage, she discovered that one of the young women who gathered in their home—and whom her husband had convinced to become a physician in order better to serve the people—had also become his lover. The affair and his deception brought her “enormous grief,” but she concluded that the fault was partly hers for being insufficiently engaged in life to be a true friend and comrade. So, with his encouragement, Petrova decided that she, too, would become a physician.13
A woman’s path to a medical career passed through either study abroad or the Women’s Medical Institute in St. Petersburg. The Institute’s entrance exam presented a major hurdle for Petrova, who had only a gymnasium education and was “almost illiterate.” Competition for admission was intense; the great majority of successful applicants had some higher education, and those who did not had distinguished themselves as medal winners in gymnasium. Petrova had been an undistinguished student “because I had occupied myself mostly with romance.”
Spurred on by “love for my husband,” she launched herself upon an intensive months-long program of study to prepare for the entrance exams. The most formidable barrier was Latin, which she tackled during the summer at their Crimean dacha, cramming with Sergei Kostychev, the son of a renowned soil scientist and the brother of her husband’s lover. Characteristically, Petrova found time for some romantic play—flirting with Kostychev in order to make her husband jealous. She proved quite successful: Kostychev courted her for six years thereafter and eventually proposed marriage. His mother, dispassionately analyzing the situation on behalf of her two children, suggested that Petrov divorce Petrova so that the priest could marry his lover (her daughter) and Petrova her son. The Petrovs, however, had weathered their marital storm and remained (in their fashion) a devoted couple.14
Admitted to the Women’s Medical Institute in 1901, Petrova studied unceasingly—motivated initially by fear of failure, and then, increasingly, by an interest in and aptitude for her studies. Her photo album soon included snapshots of the luminaries who donated their time to the fashionable cause of women’s medical education, including Pavlov’s good friend Alexander Dogel’ and his bitter rival Vladimir Bekhterev. She graduated second in a class of 340, receiving her degree with distinction in 1908.15
After graduation, she remained at the Women’s Medical Institute, working in its clinic under Professor Gennadii Smirnov, a longtime friend and associate of Pavlov’s, permanent “member-coworker” of Pavlov’s lab at the IEM, godfather to Pavlov’s son Viktor, and personal physician to the Pavlov family. He was also chief physician at the Petropavlovsk Hospital, where Petrova also worked with him from 1910.
She was by this time already engaged in research. Investigating the effect of therapeutic substances on the liver, she soon needed specialized lab facilities and specially prepared experimental dogs. (One indication of her growing independence is the fact that she conducted these experiments despite her husband’s strong anti-vivisectionist convictions.16) Smirnov suggested that she request the assistance of Vladimir Savich, who was Smirnov’s nephew and Pavlov’s assistant at the Military-Medical Academy. Savich agreed to help her operate on the necessary dogs, but asked Petrova to obtain Pavlov’s permission to use his lab. According to her account (which there is reason to doubt), she cajoled Savich into doing so himself and only later discovered that he had not—and so, unbeknownst to the chief, she worked in his lab for almost two years (1910–1912), coming in evenings from 6:00 to 10:00, after Pavlov had departed.17
By this time, the changing political winds had fundamentally altered her husband’s status and the state of their marriage. During the revolutionary upsurge, Petrov had fiercely criticized the church for having abandoned the essential teachings of Christ and his Apostles, and for betraying the people by its coldly pro-government response to Bloody Sunday.18 After the revolutionary year of 1905, the political initiative passed increasingly to the right. The campaign against Petrov intensified in 1907 when he became a Kadet candidate for the Second Duma. The reactionary Union of the Russian People and Black Hundreds targeted him, and denunciations of the dissident priest poured into the office of the Holy Synod. In January 1907, that body formally accused him of distorting Orthodoxy and inciting the people—of ignoring Christian dogma, the divinity of Christ, and the afterlife while concentrating one-sidedly on moral ideals and thus “exciting in the masses dissatisfaction with the existing order,...poisoning them with the venom of socialism and suspicion of the Holy Orthodox Church.”19 He was sentenced to three months of penitential labor and reflection at the Cheremenetskii Monastery on a small island 150 kilometers south of St. Petersburg.
On February 14, 1907, a large crowd collected at the train station to bid him farewell. “Students, priests, intellectuals of various ranks and ages, many soldiers, and also simple folk hailed him, blessed him, and cried,” according to one journalist. Many asked for a keepsake, so Petrov distributed his business cards among the well-wishers. His wife assured the press that she would join Petrov in exile were it not necessary to care for their sick son.20
Two days later, Petrov was elected to the Second Duma, the leading vote-getter in a Kadet slate that swept the Petersburg district of the city (defeating, among others, Octobrist candidate Ivan Pavlov). The Kadet leadership demanded that the Holy Synod allow him to return to Petersburg to participate in the Duma, calling him “probably the most popular person not only in the capital but in all Russia.”21 Negotiations dragged on for months. Petrov was finally permitted to return in June—several days before Stolypin dissolved the Duma. By this time, with the political winds at their back, Church authorities were moving decisively against dissidents in their midst.
Petrov was defrocked and banished from St. Petersburg and Moscow. He moved to Finland, living just across the border. There he read, wrote, and entertained his wife and son on weekends. His moment had passed in Russia, and he became increasingly interested in European culture, traveling frequently to the West. Returning from one of these trips, he confessed to Maria that he had contracted a venereal disease. She was depressed but grateful for his honesty and “exceptionally sensitive attitude and concern about my health. Being a physician, I knew how little husbands think of their wives in such cases.” Still, “I don’t know why, but my passion for him disappeared and there remained only a very good, loving, but purely platonic feeling for him to the end of his life.” Grigorii begged her not to leave him and destroy their family, but otherwise granted her “complete freedom of action.”
Deeply hurt and “passionate by nature,” she threw herself upon the first man who presented himself—her supervisor, Smirnov, who had long courted her. They made no attempt to hide their affair. Petrova grew quickly disillusioned with Smirnov and soon broke off the liaison, feeling much worse than before. She shared all this with Petrov, who comforted her in a letter—writing that she had done nothing wrong, that her personal life was nobody’s concern but their own, and that he continued to love and respect her.22
Petrova was bruised, morose, and isolated, with her semi-estranged husband in exile and her son, Boris, in Switzerland except for occasional visits during holidays. She accepted her husband’s suggestion that she find a fruitful distraction by pursuing a doctoral degree in medicine. This training would also better prepare her for practical doctoring in the hospital for the indigent that the couple planned to create with their considerable funds.
In September 1912, having completed her research on the liver, she visited Pavlov at the IEM to thank him for the use of his facilities and to ask if she might pursue her doctoral research in his lab. He no doubt remembered her from Sillamiagi and as the spouse of the famous Petrov and the recent lover of his friend Smirnov. According to Petrova’s account, the chief expressed surprise that she had been using his lab without his permission for the past two years, but he responded to this revelation in a kindly manner and consented to supervise her doctoral research, insisting (as always in such situations) that she write her thesis on CRs. His placid response to Petrova’s revelation—which would normally have elicited a furious outburst—clearly owed much to sexual attraction. According to her account, Smirnov had been worried that Pavlov’s workouts in the gym might be unhealthy for the sixty-two-year-old, and so had asked Petrova to measure his blood pressure. When she did so and pronounced it normal, Pavlov began to flirt: “And what, my dear lady, is your blood pressure?” At Petrova’s reply that it was normal, he exclaimed: “It cannot be that such a lively, agile, and enchanting weighty creature (I was rather plump) is normal; let me measure it myself.” Measuring her blood pressure and finding it normal, he congratulated her: “To be so lively and so passionate, and to have such good regulation.”23
Two months later, in November 1912, she began her doctoral research in Pavlov’s lab at the Military-Medical Academy. Since she was a trained experimenter—and, no doubt, because he planned a close collaboration—he assigned her an important and difficult thesis topic: the irradiation of excitation and inhibition.
Petrova had earlier worked under Erofeeva’s supervision in Smirnov’s clinic, so Pavlov asked his star female coworker to familiarize his newest recruit with lab techniques and culture. According to Petrova, Erofeeva was romantically interested in the chief, and this would soon sour relations between the two women. Initially, however, all went smoothly. Erofeeva soon reported that Petrova had sufficiently mastered experimental techniques to begin original research, and Pavlov provided her with a dog equipped with a salivary fistula and a well-established set of CRs.
Once Petrova began her experiments, Pavlov’s special attitude toward her became evident. “He would literally, as soon as he entered [the lab], sit with me [at the bench] all the time, assigning other coworkers to his assistants.”24
The two years of Petrova’s thesis research provided ample opportunity for an extended, lab-based courtship. Pavlov’s secular faith differed radically from Petrov’s Christianity—but he, too, was charismatic and offered personal salvation in service to a higher cause. Their relationship took a form comfortably familiar to each: for Petrova, enthusiastic subordination to an older man who was authoritative, demanding, eager to develop her potential, and usually kind; for Pavlov, the role of the demanding, temperamental, but kind-hearted patriarch. Constantly beside her at the bench, speaking animatedly about subjects both scientific and nonscientific, Pavlov, she recalled, “did everything possible to capture me and subordinate me to him,” using “the strength of his intellect, his kindness, gentleness, and exclusive attention to me.... I was in his power, saw everything through his eyes.”25 Captivated, she ceased to grieve about her husband, with whom she maintained “the most heartfelt friendly relationship.” He remained her closest confidante, and was fully aware of her new romance.26
Combining work with pleasure, Petrova (with Pavlov at her side) successfully followed up Krasnogorskii’s thesis with a massive research effort on the irradiation and concentration of excitation and inhibition. Trials such as these delighted the chief with their crisp results: The experimenters fastened a kololka to one of the dog’s rear legs, allowing them to stimulate any one of five points from its paws to its belly. Excitation of the lowest of these points (#1) was repeatedly reinforced to make it a CS; irritation of the four points above it was unreinforced, making each a CI. Thus, excitation of #1 elicited salivation; excitation of #2–#5 elicited none. What occurred when excitation of #1 was followed immediately by excitation of one of the other places? Here are two exemplary trials from November 191327:
For Pavlov and Petrova, these trials clearly demonstrated not only the differentiation of the CS (#1) from the CIs (#2 and #5), but also the irradiation of inhibition. The salivation elicited by exciting point #1 was more rapidly reduced by the inhibitory wave produced by immediately afterwards exciting inhibitory point #2 than it was by exciting the more distant inhibitory point #5. Following established neurological doctrine, Pavlov believed that the relative position of these points on the dog’s body corresponded to the relative position of the other end of their analyzers in the dog’s cerebral cortex, so experiments such as these reflected the irradiation of excitation and inhibition not just from the dog’s paws to its pelvis, but across the points in the cerebral cortex that controlled the CRs formed by exciting the dog’s body. 28
Acknowledging Pavlov’s assistance in her thesis, Petrova added to the familiar phrases an allusion to her special relationship to the chief: “I cannot but express a feeling of most heartfelt acknowledgment and profound gratitude to my dear and most respected teacher, Professor I. P. Pavlov, not only for proposing an interesting theme, but also for the constant guidance, attention, and interest that he took in my work. His frequent presence during this work always brought enormous moral satisfaction: his passion and perseverance in the search for scientific truths and his joyful animation at the achievement of these truths was transmitted also to those of us working with him and made the work itself twice as interesting and pleasant. Moreover, a person who has worked with him for a long time, and knows him well not only as a man of science but also simply as a man, will not depart from him without a sense of most profound respect and gratitude.”29
The pair soon began to follow their exciting afternoons at the lab with a stimulating walk—or rather, jog—along their common path home, proceeding together from the Military-Medical Academy across Sampsonievskii Bridge to Kamennoostrovskii Prospekt, at which point Petrova would continue toward her flat on that fashionable avenue while Pavlov would veer off toward his apartment on Vvedenskaia St. Unlike Serafima, Maria happily adopted Ivan’s brisk gait. He “trained me well,” she later recalled. They would race down the middle of the street in order to avoid slow-moving pedestrians on the walkways. “I remember in what an enlivened, elevated mood I would arrive home after such a run.” Himself impressed and enchanted, Pavlov once complimented Petrova that she “doesn’t walk, but rather flies” and that he always knew when she was entering a room because “all the radiators hum from her presence.”30
All this did not, of course, pass unnoticed. In the lab, coworkers grumbled. The chief had largely abandoned his longtime practice of spending time with each at the bench—and had little inclination to even talk to them about science. Upon entering the lab, he would run directly for Petrova, “responding quickly on his way to any questions posed to him.”31 The Bezbokaia debacle was one result of this new management style. Erofeeva’s jealousy boiled over. Earlier, when Petrova had been infatuated with Kravkov, the two women had shared confidences and Erofeeva had confided her romantic interest in Pavlov. By the eve of Petrova’s doctoral defense in the spring of 1914, Erofeeva’s attitude toward her former charge had, in Petrova’s account, become downright hostile. She apparently told Pavlov of Petrova’s earlier affair with Smirnov (he doubtless knew of this already), and was so openly hostile toward the chief’s paramour that when Petrova received a venomous anonymous letter accusing her of sleeping with him she concluded immediately that Erofeeva was the author.
That letter arrived on the eve of Petrova’s doctoral defense—an obvious attempt, she thought, at sabotage. Unnerved, she performed disappointingly during what should have been a triumphant afternoon. Yet the results of her exam were never in doubt: her thesis was substantial and impressive, and two of her three examiners (Pavlov and Kravkov) were quite inclined to give her the benefit of any doubt.
Stung by the anonymous letter, uncomfortable with her situation in the lab, and no doubt hoping to provoke Pavlov’s jealousy, Petrova informed him by letter in early summer 1914 (when he was recuperating in Crimea from a lung infection) that she had decided to accept Kravkov’s invitation to join his lab in the fall. Pavlov responded immediately that he was stunned by the “undeserved insult” of the anonymous letter and refused to accept her departure.32 Petrova stood her ground, and upon his return from the Crimea Pavlov again tried to dissuade her. Tortured by memories of Petrova beaming at Kravkov during meetings of the Society of Russian Physicians, he invoked not only the importance of their scientific collaboration, but also Kravkov’s “frivolous attitude” toward women. Finally, in frustration, he suggested that she divide her weeks between the two labs. She agreed, but Kravkov did not—and so, well armed now with an excuse to follow her heart, she used this “insult” as a reason to remain with Pavlov.
In her narrative, their relationship then took an explicitly romantic turn. Pavlov asked that they “seal the union with a kiss,” which turned immediately passionate. His fervor “captured me in a wave” and she “fell in love with Ivan Petrovich with the most urgent love.”33 The pent-up emotions, hopes, and expectations of their two-year courtship made the couple giddily unselfconscious in their enjoyment of each other’s company. “I spent six days a week with him in the laboratory; during experiments I sat next to him and listened to him, listened without end to his voice, constantly interrupted with kisses, so spellbound that I could not take my eyes off of him. And Sundays, when he took me from the Military-Medical Academy to the Institute of Experimental Medicine, he would leave the Institute (where he then worked on Sundays for three hours) and wait for me on the corner of Lopukhinskaia and Kamennoostrovskii. At this time I would be arriving on the tram from the clinic, and we would set off to wander along the [city’s] islands until suppertime.”34
During their perambulations around St. Petersburg, they inevitably encountered their, and their spouses’, acquaintances. For Petrova, this was no problem: she had shared with Grigorii all the details of her new romance—and this, by her telling, had helped equalize their relationship and cement their friendship. Pavlov, of course, had not been nearly so candid with Serafima. The relationship had not been sexually consummated, and it was all, as he portrayed it, quite innocent. “Maria and I ran a race,” he would say; “Maria and I competed over a distance.” One day, however, Serafima confronted him with the pungent comment of an acquaintance who had seen the pair on the street: “Why,” her friend had asked, “do you permit Ivan Petrovich to stroll everywhere with Petrova?” He did not change his behavior, but for some time avoided mentioning Petrova to his family and family friends.
So Pavlov’s lab enterprise was prospering; his research was seemingly reaching into the mysteries of the psyche; he was financially comfortable, with a supportive domestic life and flourishing children; he led a satisfyingly pravil’nyi life in Petersburg and Sillamiagi, taking both “mental” and “muscular joy” among a rich circle of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers; and he was enjoying the exuberant days of a maturing romance when he heard the guns of August.