Introduction

Contrary to legend, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) never trained a dog to salivate to

the sound of a bell. In over three decades of research and tens of thousands of
experimental trials, he and his coworkers used a bell only in rare, unimportant
circumstances. Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his
real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli
(he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electri-
cal shock).
Nor was he ever much interested in training dogs, let alone to do something
so simple and commonplace as salivating on cue. Had that been his goal, this tal-
ented scientist would surely not have required thirty years, three large labs, and
scores of coworkers to accomplish it. One might conclude that by his procedures
he sometimes actually was training dogs—but, except when he did so for his
larger investigative goals, that was not his intent or interpretation.
Nor did he even once utter the Russian equivalent of the phrase conditioned
reflex—an Anglo-American distortion of his uslovnyi refleks (conditional reflex)
that also encouraged a misunderstanding of his methods and goals.
These and other myths framed an iconic Pavlov that, even during his lifetime,
obscured the nature of his scientific quest. So, in the words of his lover and clos-
est collaborator, he “was pronounced the greatest physiologist of his time and,
nevertheless, in an international setting, remained to some degree alone.”1
His true quest was infinitely more ambitious. “Only one thing in life is of
essential interest for us,” he observed at its outset—“our psychical experience.”
From 1903 to 1936 he directed an army of coworkers in his attempt to under-
stand the psyche of his experimental dogs and thereby to “illuminate our myste-
rious nature, [to] explain the mechanism and vital meaning of that which most
occupies Man—our consciousness and its torments.”2 This research was rooted
in his fervent belief in the scientistic faith of his day—the view that the devel-
opment of science offered the surest path to human progress, to human beings’
rational control over themselves and society. Pursuing it, Pavlov deployed most
ingeniously and determinedly the tools of his trade. An outstanding practitioner
of the mechanistic vision and new experimental physiology of the mid- to late

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 2 Ivan Pavlov

nineteenth century, he was indefatigable and intellectually ambitious. His inves-

tigations ended only with his death at age eighty-six. I know no other scientist
for whom fully one-half of a biography might reasonably be devoted to his or her
life and research after age sixty-five.
Another, related part of Pavlov’s iconic image is, then, also profoundly mis-
leading:  the notion that, like his contemporaries, the American behaviorists,
he denied the importance or even the existence of an inner, subjective world
and believed that scientific psychology must settle for the analysis of external
behaviors. Pavlov saw behaviorism as an expression of “the practical inclination
of the American accustomed to evaluate people not by their words and inter-
nal experiences, but by deeds”—and he valued its contribution to objectivism.3
Yet it was precisely those internal experiences—“our consciousness and its tor-
ments”—that preoccupied him, and which he hoped to address by developing an
integrated understanding of physiology and psychology, of the “objective” and
“subjective” realms. Far from denying the inner life of his experimental animals,
he identified them as heroes and cowards, intelligent and obtuse, independent
and compliant, sociable and aloof, freedom fighters and narrow pragmatists.
One was a “Napoleonic type”—crafty and determined; and experiments upon
another resolved a mystery about his own life.
In this biography, I use archival materials and a close reading of long-ignored
texts—including hundreds of dissertations and articles by his coworkers—to
follow Pavlov on his grand quest, to explore his ingenious, sustained attempt to
use “saliva drops and logic” to understand mechanistically the psyches, person-
alities, drives, and mental illnesses of dogs and people.
He embarked on this path only at age fifty-four, by which time he had earned
a Nobel Prize for his earlier studies of digestion. In this research during the
1890s, he coordinated the labors of about a hundred mostly untrained coworkers
to analyze the digestive system as a purposive “chemical factory” that produced
precisely the amount and type of secretions to process ingested foods. Here he
confronted the psyche, in the form of “appetite,” as a capricious ghost in the
digestive machine. Pavlov learned that the differences among his lab dogs—their
varying physical qualities, food tastes, and personalities—influenced experi-
mental results. So, in this justly renowned model of “objective” experimental sci-
ence, he first grappled systematically with the psyche as he interpreted his data
and shaped it into his famous Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands
(1897). As he was filling in the details after that synthetic work, provocatively
paradoxical results with the relatively minor salivary glands led him to see these
as a direct window on the psyche—launching the research that transformed him
from a mere Nobelist into an icon of his age.
All this makes Pavlov’s science worthy of close attention, but his life story
is equally rich and compelling. It is the tale of a powerful personality deeply
embedded in some 100  years of Russian history, particularly that of its intel-
ligentsia. Born to a family of priests in provincial Riazan before the serfs were

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 Introduction 3

emancipated, he made his home and professional success in the booming capital
of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of
his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and the civil war of 1917–1921,
rebuilt his life in his seventies during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished pro-
fessionally as never before in 1929–1936 during the industrialization, cultural
revolution, and terror of Stalin times.
We begin, then, with the family of a successful priest in Riazan and the
new opportunities and ethos of Reform-era Russia that led young Pavlov to
defy his father and abandon the seminary for the new secular faith of Science,
Modernization, and Westernization. The scene then shifts to St. Petersburg in
the 1870s and 1880s and to the acclaimed faculties at St. Petersburg University
and Russia’s leading medical school, the Military-Medical Academy; to Pavlov’s
brilliant and ill-fated mentor Il’ia Tsion and the circumstances that destroyed
him (and horrified his protegé); to the women’s liberation and populist move-
ments that brought a religiously devout young woman, Pavlov’s future wife, to
St. Petersburg; and to the play of chance and academic politics that cast him
into the wilderness for fifteen years. Rejected twice for professorships in phys-
iology, laboring with mixed success in the small “nasty lab” that he adminis-
tered to make ends meet, and unable even to afford an apartment where he
could live with his wife and son, he was, at age forty, diagnosed with “neuras-
thenia or hysteria,” but believed that he was dying from a degenerative disease
of the nerves.
This was the era of “scientific medicine”—and an unforeseeable combina-
tion of tsarist policies to modernize Russian medicine, Pasteur’s rabies vaccine,
Koch’s failed cure for tuberculosis, academic networks, and an enterprising
prince of the tsarist family then combined to make Pavlov, suddenly, master
of Russia’s largest and best-equipped physiological laboratory. Flourishing in
the 1890s as director of the Physiology Division of the Imperial Institute of
Experimental Medicine and Professor of Physiology at the Military-Medical
Academy, he basked in the fruits of his success: interesting scientific research,
financial security, a growing family attuned to his every wish, summers at his
beloved dacha, and a rich circle of friends drawn especially from Russia’s artistic
community.
As he returned from Stockholm with his Nobel Prize in 1904, defeat in
the Russo-Japanese War plunged his homeland into political crisis. In a brief
flurry of political activity that began just before the 1905 revolution, he joined
the struggle for expanded democratic freedoms and ran unsuccessfully for the
Duma as a candidate of the center-right Octobrists. He had just completed the
first decade of his conditional reflexes research with two breakthroughs on
the physiology of emotion, had begun acquiring what would become a stun-
ning collection of Russian realist art, and was romantically involved with the
wife of a famous populist priest when the Guns of August sounded the death
knell for his world.

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 4 Ivan Pavlov

War, revolution, and civil war from 1914 to 1921 brought his research to a
near halt, annihilated his social circle, and seared his family. One son died on
the road to enlist with the Whites, another fled into exile with the Red victory in
1921. St. Petersburg was now “hungry Petrograd”—friends and colleagues per-
ished and emigrated, his lab froze over, the dogs starved, and the Pavlovs’ com-
fortable life became a grueling struggle for survival punctuated by police raids in
search of valuables in the home of a vocal critic of the new regime. An anguished
Pavlov seriously considered emigration, but finally decided to remain in Russia
and began an evolving, complex fifteen-year period of negotiation, struggle, and
cooperation with the Bolsheviks.
His life thereafter was embedded in that of Soviet Russia under Lenin and
Stalin. In a formal declaration of 1921, the Soviet state promised to provide
Pavlov’s labs with everything he might need, and it fully redeemed that pledge
over the next fifteen years. Those labs were back on their feet by 1922, and his
scientific enterprise expanded mightily in the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s—
most dramatically at Koltushi, outside of Leningrad, where massive funding
transformed a rural dog nursery into a science village and country home for the
Soviet Union’s most acclaimed scientist.
This sumptuous support was part of a complex game in which the Bolsheviks
and Pavlov tried to use and influence each other. For the Bolsheviks, Pavlov was a
political reactionary, an internationally prestigious figure with connections and
propaganda value, and a talented scientist whose research provided substantial
support for their own materialist worldview. They attempted both to convert
and control him as they prepared a replacement generation of truly Soviet scien-
tists. For Pavlov, the Communist state was dogmatic, incompetent, repressive,
and deeply criminal, but it was also the government of his beloved homeland
and, particularly after 1933, its guardian in an alarming international situation.
He relentlessly criticized state policies—especially the waves of political arrests
and the persecution of religion—but also celebrated the great expansion and
cultural prestige of Soviet science and, as a firm believer in the civilizing mis-
sion of science, thought this, in the final analysis, might make the Communists
themselves more realistic—and so more humane and democratic.
The dynamics of this relationship brought the politics and culture of Soviet
Russia into every sphere of Pavlov’s life. In his labs, he fiercely defended his pre-
rogatives against growing state controls and railed against official policies, but
he also respected many of his Communist coworkers (whom he entrusted with
key positions and lines of investigation) and felt a moral obligation to redeem
the state’s massive support for his research. The members of Pavlov’s family dis-
agreed about how he should relate to the Bolsheviks and pulled him in opposing
directions, and his lover became a conduit of Communist Party influence. The
state was constantly informed of the physiologist’s contradictory sentiments by
a network of informers that reported on his utterances in the lab, in gatherings
large and small, and at home.

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 Introduction 5

During his last years, Pavlov used his influence to save many victims from
the gulag, frequently denounced the regime at gatherings with coworkers, and
protested eloquently to Molotov and other Bolshevik leaders about the hor-
rors of Stalin times. Yet he also perceived a growing tendency toward modera-
tion and praised them for important achievements, most dramatically at the
International Physiological Congress of 1935, where he publicly toasted the
Soviet leadership as “great experimenters.”
Pavlov was determined, disciplined, principled, and powerful; authoritarian,
controlling, and intense; extraordinarily energetic and explosive. He expressed
his deepest notions of human virtue in such lifelong keywords as tselesoo-
braznost’ (purposefulness, self-directedness), a quality that he also attributed
to animals and their organ systems; and, most importantly, dostoinstvo (moral
honor, self-worth, and dignity).
His sense of dostoinstvo was profound, with its light and dark sides. For
Pavlov, the struggle for dostoinstvo was the secular counterpart of the soul’s
aspiration toward God—a precious source of order, direction, and personal cer-
tainty. Throughout his life, he showed himself willing for reasons of moral honor
and personal dignity to confront and defy those who were more powerful than
he, even when this was clearly to his own disadvantage. Yet his sense of dostoin-
stvo drew also upon a prickly sensitivity to slights real or imagined—a trait that
characterized him from childhood, but which was exacerbated by defensiveness
about his modest social origins and by the long anxious years of deprivation,
disappointment, and failure before he acquired his first professorial position at
age forty-one. Once successful, he defended his prerogatives, status, and enter-
prise fiercely—whether against a colleague’s presumed slight or the Bolsheviks’
bureaucratic intrusions.
For Pavlov, science was not merely a set of principles and methodologies, a
career, or even a calling. It was also a value system, worldview, and way of life
fundamental to his sense of dostoinstvo and self. He devoted himself to its ideals
with sincerity, passion, and astonishing energy. Conversely, as he fashioned him-
self around this science, practiced it successfully, and became one of its iconic
figures, he came easily to identify it unselfconsciously with his own methods,
achievements, status, values, and desires.
The science of this quintessential “objectivist” was suffused by the context and
common sense of his day and by his own experiences, values, beliefs, and person-
ality. As so often in science, these informed the deep structure of his research
through various metaphors drawn from a multitude of sources. The industri-
alization of Russia in the 1880s and 1890s—and his reaction to it—left a pro-
found mark upon his digestive research, for example, in the form of his guiding
metaphor that “the digestive system is a chemical factory.” His research on con-
ditional reflexes was also shaped by metaphors that joined his thinking about
physiology and psychology to broader experiences and values—for example,
through his equation of excitation with freedom and inhibition with discipline.4

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 6 Ivan Pavlov

Neither of these guiding metaphors was unique to Pavlov—quite to the contrary,

he drew them from the common cultural resources of his time and place. Other
metaphors—such as his attempts to imagine unseen processes in the brain in
terms of “irradiation and concentration” and “induction”—originated in more
esoteric discussions in physiology and neurology. Pavlov’s selective appropria-
tion and use of them, and his metaphorical system as a whole, however, were the
particular products of his own experiences and intellectual style.
One of Pavlov’s lifelong metaphorical habits was to view dogs as people, and
people as dogs. Properly speaking, one might term the first of these “anthro-
pomorphism” and the second “zoomorphism,” but I will refer to them both as
“anthropomorphism”—as two moments of a single conceptual process. Pavlov’s
thinking featured the constant conceptual interplay between experiences with—
and understandings of—dogs and people. Thus he designed and interpreted lab
experiments by reference not only to broader social and political issues, but also
to his own personality and inner life. As he once put it, “That which I see in dogs,
I immediately transfer to myself, since, you know, the basics are identical.”5 By
the same logic, he also frequently “transferred” to dogs that which he saw (or
sensed) in himself and the people around him.
The profound connection between Pavlov’s science and one of his most
deep-seated psychological drives was captured in two keywords that appeared
frequently in his comments about physiological processes, science, dogs, people,
and life in general—sluchainost’ and pravil’nost’. The noun sluchainost’ means
chance, accidents, randomness; its plural form is sluchainosti, and its mascu-
line adjectival form is sluchainyi (the plural is sluchainye). The noun pravil’nost’
means regularity, lawfulness, and correctness (which, for Pavlov, were one and
the same); it shares the same root with the word pravilo (rule, law, or regularity),
and its masculine adjectival form is pravil’nyi (the plural is pravil’nye). (To avoid
confusion, I  will use the plural and masculine adjectival forms in the present
text, as these occur most frequently in Pavlov’s commentaries.)
“What is the most difficult, really terrible aspect of human life?” Pavlov asked
rhetorically in the last months of his life. The answer was obvious: “Sluchainosti
and sluchainosti.” For him, sluchainosti were the always negative, frightening con-
sequences of chance and unpredictability. As a mechanistic determinist, he did
not believe in the ultimate sluchainost’ of anything; yet sluchainosti plagued a
vulnerable individual from outside his or her frame of reference, understanding,
and control—in the form of a hereditary disease, the obstacles of birth and social
class, a tile falling from an overhead ledge, a revolution that overturns one’s life,
or the unexpected death of a child or friend. The first serious sluchainost’ that
preoccupied Pavlov was probably his own temper—the uncontrollable “morbid,
spontaneous paroxysms” (his words) for which he was famous throughout his
life. Like all humans, he would suffer many others—including a traumatic child-
hood fall that rendered him an invalid for about a year, the disturbingly erratic
behavior of close family members, bouts of mental distress and depression, the

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 Introduction 7

destruction of his beloved mentor at the university, the death of a brother in a

hunting accident, the unforeseen contingency that cost him a badly needed and
“sure” appointment at Tomsk University during his wilderness years, and the
Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath—including the deaths of his favorite
child and his best friend. Sluchainosti rendered it impossible to “peacefully and
soberly calculate and fulfill my mission in life,” for which “one needs a regular
[pravil’nyi], undisturbable course of life and certainty in it.”6
Pravil’nost’, then, was the opposite of and antidote for sluchainosti: regularity,
lawfulness, and correctness—in the organism itself, in the form of scientific law,
and in life. Pavlov demanded these qualities in his daily existence—living by a
ferociously precise schedule and cherishing predictability as a reassuring mea-
sure of control over his own explosive nature and the demonstrably cruel ran-
domness of life. While sluchainost’ was the province of chaos and vulnerability,
pravil’nost’ was the realm of law, predictability, certainty, and control—the prov-
ince of science. Pravil’nost’ was also necessary to tselesoobraznost’—to purpose-
fulness both in the organism’s physiological processes and in the life well lived.
Pavlov’s personality and science were not, of course, reducible to his drive for
certainty. People, and science, are much more complicated than that. That drive,
however, manifested itself in every dimension of his life: his reaction to events,
people, and politics; his approach to work, relaxation, and sports; his love let-
ters; and, of course, his science. The keywords sluchainost’ and pravil’nost’ worked
metaphorically to establish and express intellectual and emotional relations
between these various realms. His scientific style, accomplishments, and goals
represented a layering of personal experiences and temperament, his training
and talents, during an era in physiology that identified deterministic, mechanis-
tic explanations with “good science” and a broader social-political culture that
joined such explanations to a broader vision and dreams for mankind.
In this biography I seek to portray the man and scientist behind the icon. This
does not diminish his achievements in the least, but rather illustrates the truth,
long known to historians of science and scientists themselves, that science is a
profoundly human activity. Pavlov did not adhere to abstract textbook defini-
tions of scientific method, but neither did Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Bernard,
Darwin, Pasteur, Millikan, or Einstein. Interpretation is inherent to science, and
interpretive frameworks are sensitive to context and belief. This does not mean,
of course, that science is simply a matter of opinion; rather, that its truths, how-
ever valuable, are always partial and tendentious, like all human knowledge.

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