It also corrects some surprising misconceptions about Pavlov and his work. “But the cloth is whole.” The Wall Street Journal’s Raymond Tallis hailed it as a “masterpiece of the biographer’s art” and a “mighty work of scholarship.”) (“No review is going to give adequate notice of the wealth of information, which weaves the science, the person, and the staggering historical events into a whole cloth,” noted Roger Smith, author of Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology, in Somatosphere, a science blog. Ivan Pavlov, which tips the scales at three pounds, two ounces, and 880 pages, is a science historian’s answer to Tolstoy, and immediately became the definitive biography. His respect for the craft of writing can be seen in his view of rewriting: “I love the way that rewriting is rethinking, the way that prose problems expose my ignorance, conceptual ambiguities, and lapses.”Īll in all, it’s hard to imagine Pavlov finding a better Boswell. In the case of Pavlov, that required an unusual skill set: fluency in Russian and a deep appreciation for Russian history, a scholarly comprehension of science in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ability to distill the science as well as the history and personalities into highly readable prose. Which leads to the other key element of a perfect biographical storm: the biographer, who must be capable of understanding his subject and writing him to life. It would consume more than 20 years-during which time he “often couldn’t sleep from the combination of excitement and anxiety.” “I realized that, given his life span, there was probably a rich story to tell and that, with the archives now open, I might be able to tell it.” By the end of his first year in the archives, he realized he had the opportunity of a lifetime. “I knew from my dissertation work that there was nothing even vaguely satisfactory about Pavlov, and that historians had yet to analyze his life and work seriously,” says Todes, a professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of the History of Medicine. What raised the stakes even higher for Todes was that his extraordinary, Nobel Prize-winning character-whose iconic experiments with dogs so permeated Western culture that they made their way into a Rolling Stones song-had never been the subject of a serious biography in any language. Having had the great luck to begin his long labor of love at the dawn of glasnost, Todes had access to massive amounts of material, much of it previously off-limits-from unpublished letters and drafts of scientific articles to an essay on science, Communism, and religion that Pavlov was writing when he died, to secret Soviet surveillance reports on him and his laboratories and family. #Pavlov nobelist plus“A fascinating man, who led a long and rich life that stretched from before the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin’s Russia, with a great cast of characters, including the Eastern Orthodox Church, Dostoevsky, a prince of the tsarist family, the Moscow merchants, Lenin, and Stalin plus rich and important scientific work-and the archival materials to deal with all of this in a deep and satisfying way.” “Pavlov’s story seemed to have everything a Russianist and historian of science could want,” says Todes, whose monumental Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science was published last November by Oxford University Press. One element of that storm was the man himself. Zhivago.īY SAMUEL HUGHES | Illustration by Dave Hollenbachīy his own account, Daniel Todes C’74 Gr’81 was on the “right side of a perfect storm” when he set out to write a biography of Ivan Pavlov, the legendary Russian scientist. The result is a science historian’s answer to Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dr. _ rating in the NFL is on a scale from 0 to 158.Daniel Todes spent 25 years researching and writing his epochal biography of Ivan Pavlov.
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