Термен не мрет: a fractional biography of failure

Abstract

Peter Hitchcock has described the subject of this paper as ‘the story of the twentieth century’. Lev Termen (commonly anglicized as Leon Theremin) was a musician, inventor, entrepreneur and espionage agent who developed the Theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that is played without physical contact by the musician, and the first radio-controlled electronic bugging device, among many other electronic instruments and technologies. Despite this inventive fecundity, however, none of his inventions were marketed successfully, at least in a conventional sense. This paper is an unconventional dual biography of Termen and the Theremin, in which I juxtapose a linear, inventor-centred account of the technologies, exemplified by my sources, with a narrative focusing on some of their multiple meanings, uses and developments; and on the multiple, fractional, yet connected identities of their inventor. The paper concludes with a discussion of the substantive and methodological implications of this ‘fractional biography of failure’, drawing on some aspects of the work of Walter Benjamin.