Ivan Pavlov

Winner of the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society "Contrary to legend, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell." So begins this definitive, deeply researched biography of Ivan Pavlov. Daniel P. Todes fundamentally reinterprets the Russian physiologist's famous research on conditional reflexes and weaves his life, values, and science into the tumultuous century of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia-from the reign of tsar Nicholas I to Stalin's time. Ivan Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Riazan before the serfs were emancipated, and made his home and professional success in the booming capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia. He suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-21, rebuilt his life in his seventies as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in the 1930s industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin times. Using a wide variety of previously unavailable archival materials, Todes tells a vivid story of that life and redefines Pavlov's legacy. Pavlov was not, in fact, a behaviorist who believed that psychology should address only external behaviors; rather, he sought to explain the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans, "the torments of our consciousness." This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works by Pavlov and his coworkers, and close analysis of materials from some twenty-five archives. The materials range from the records of his student years at Riazan Seminary to the transcripts of the Communist Party cells in his labs, and from his scientific manuscripts and notebooks to his political speeches; they include revealing love letters to his future wife and correspondence with hundreds of scholars, artists, and Communist Party leaders; and memoirs by many coworkers, his daughter, his wife, and his lover. The product of more than twenty years of research, this is the first scholarly biography of the physiologist to be published in any language.

Daniel P. Todes is Professor of History of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought and two earlier books on Pavlov: Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, and a short biography for young adults, Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine.

Preface Introduction PART ONE: The Seminarian Chooses Science (1849-1874) 1. The Pavlovs of Riazan 2. Seminarian in the `Sixties 3. St. Petersburg University PART TWO: Wilderness Years (1875-1890) 4. The Reluctant Physician 5. Serafima Vasil'evna Karchevskaia 6. Time of Troubles 7. In From the Cold PART THREE: Man of Tsarist Science (1891-1904) 8. A NonChekhovian Type 9. The Pavlovs of St. Petersburg 10. Professor of Physiology 11. The Physiology Factory: Forces of Production 12. The Physiology Factory: Relations of Production 13. Favorite Dogs 14. A Convincing Synthesis 15. Dacha Life 16. A European Reputation 17. Targeting the Psyche 18. The Nobel Prize PART FOUR: Nobelist in the Silver Age (1905-1914) 19. Amid Russia's Political Crisis 20. Family Life 21. Pavlov's Quest 22. The Factory Retooled 23. Battle of the Titans 24. Women Coworkers and the Physiology of Emotion 25. Mariia Kapitonovna Petrova PART FIVE: War and Revolution (1914-1921) 26. War 27. Revolution 28. Cataclysm 29. Where Are You, Freedom? 30 To Leave My Homeland PART SIX: Prosperous Dissident (1922-1929) 31. The Pavlovs of Leningrad 32. A Great Journey 33. Laboratory Revival 34. Lecturing the Bolsheviks and Leaving the Academy 35. The Commissar and the Dialectician 36. Freud, the Flood, and the Physiology of Personality 37. Two Books and a Beast 38. Types, Temperament, and Character 39. Work and Play in City and Countryside 40. On the Eve of the Great Break PART SEVEN: Icon of Soviet and World Science (1929-1936) 41. International Celebrity 42. Stalin Times 43. Pavlov's Communists 44. Koltushi: Pavlov's Science Village 45. Psychiatry 46. Gestalt Pavlov-Style 47. Year of Climaxes 48. At the Summit: The International Physiology Congress 49. Final Days Epilogue Glossary Bibliography