Léon Theremin’s name does not yet have the cachet of his inventor compatriot Nikola Tesla, whose moniker sits curb-side these days on sleekly shaped automobiles. Tesla’s life in the United States began in the 1880s, with work for Thomas Edison, which led to substantial discoveries connected with AC current before his inventions related to wireless electricity and global communication systems failed to gain mass appeal.
Theremin’s best-known invention is the musical instrument named for him. The theremin, which is played without the thereminist touching its controls, is among the first electronic musical instruments. Its two antennas sense the player’s hands, allowing her to manipulate pitch and volume while sending the sound to a loudspeaker.
Sean Michaels’ Giller Prize-winning novel Us Conductors opens late in the game, in 1938, with Léon Theremin locked in a cabin on the Stary Bolshevik, traveling back to his native Soviet Union. He considers the dark direction his life has taken and we get a lesson in how to play the theremin: “You wait to give the tubes the chance to warm, like creatures taking their first breaths. . . . You stand before a cabinet and two antennas and immediately the space itself is activated, the room is charged, the atmosphere is alive. . . . Raise the right hand first, toward the pitch antenna, and you will hear it: DZEEEEOOOoo, a shocked electric coo, steadying into a long hymn. Raise the left hand, toward the volume antenna, and you will quiet it.”
This semi-magical vocation never quite comes clear to the reader, though we meet dedicated thereminists and follow their bodies in motion. The machine and its eerie approximation of traditional musical sound remains foreign. But Michaels is expert at weaving a light-handed, fanciful narrative – an historical roman à clef – around Theremin himself, his undertakings as a Soviet scientist, which lead to fruitful years in flapper-era Manhattan before he is hauled back for a taste of the true awfulness of Stalin’s gulag system.
Theremin’s edge over Tesla as a fictional character is the fact that his many inventions include something so strangely ahead of its time as the theremin, with the potential to enchant, to attract a coterie of trainees and supporters who sought it out in community gatherings on the Russian steppe, at Carnegie Hall, as a complement to the excitements of jazz era New York or Ravel’s Kaddish.
Though Theremin is sent to the United States as a Soviet agent, he finds plenty of time for performances, for tinkering with his instrument’s possibilities, as well as for a failed effort to popularize the theremin via a sales deal with RCA. The Depression intervenes, as do murky machinations among the Soviet fixers for whom Theremin is acting as a front. He is packed off one day without the chance to tell his American wife where he is being taken. The Stary Bolshevik is his first European prison, and like a forgotten invention, he disappears into the gulag archipelago, among the hundreds of thousands of wasted lives sent east on the whim of NKVD agents.
The front two-thirds of Us Conductors is largely lightness and fun, a portrait of a naïf at loose ends in the big city, of the romances that come his way along with haphazard friendships. George Gershwin makes an appearance, as does Tommy Dorsey.
Michaels’ style is hard to pin down as he follows Theremin’s New York ups and downs. There is whimsy and wit, and a certain poetic otherworldliness to his descriptions of his hero’s progress. At times one feels the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby in Michaels’ portrayal of speakeasies and their denizens’ repartee:
“What are you doing on New Year’s?” I asked.
“Haven’t decided,” you said. “Trying to find either the biggest bash or the smallest.”
If the bulk of Us Conductors is a portrait of an innocent abroad in the big city, then its final movement is pure descent – Theremin, back in Moscow, is soon penniless, friendless, and because of a clueless request for help from an old contact who has become a major Soviet military figure, he is packed off to the edge of Siberia at Kolyma. Here Michaels has done careful reading in the historiography of the gulag, but his presentation – sharply imagistic and concise – bears a resemblance to Primo Levi’s picture perfect presentation of his year of survival in Auschwitz. Michaels’ presentation of gulag life is gritty, pungent, full of sharply drawn scenes that decry the totalitarian approach to men’s lives without a hint of didacticism.
Theremin catches the interest of the man running the slave labour camp at Kolyma by suggesting a way to improve efficiency in the brigade of workers who use wheelbarrows to transfer loads over kilometres of rocky ground. Suddenly, he is released, into another chapter of indentured labour: a dark period under the watch of Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, seeking new kinds of listening devices to place in the embassies of the Soviet Union’s many enemies.
Michaels gives Theremin the benefit of the doubt regarding these undertakings. The inventor recognizes Beria’s fearsome authority as the darkest expression of Soviet policy. But after his release from prison in the late ’40s it’s understood that Theremin continued to work for the KGB on a range of spy-related technologies. This detail does not quite match the novel’s portrait of the man as unlucky dupe.
On the subject of historical accuracy Us Conductors lets itself off the hook with an introductory epigraph: “THIS BOOK IS MOSTLY INVENTIONS.” The reader appreciates the double-entendre, and yet, there is so much that is historically accurate in Us Conductors it is difficult to know when Michaels allows himself the freedom of invention.
The choice by the Giller Prize jury of Us Conductors represents a satisfying turn by the country’s major literary prize. Michaels’ novel is no breezy entertainment, although he does manage to present his fascinations with technology, music and political history using a wily and captivating voice. As a first novel Us Conductors is undoubtedly a breakthrough, representing the arrival in our literature of a voice worth following for its next idiosyncratic choices.