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Rockets and People
in detail in his novel First Circle.Theremin continued to invent until the last days
of his ninety-seven-year life!
In and of itself, the meeting with the ninety-three-year-old Theremin was
utterly fantastic. He arrived at Natasha’s home on 12 January 1986 with his
thereminvox and proposed that we try out our musical abilities. In 1926, we young
radio enthusiasts had not been allowed to touch Theremin’s marvelous wooden
box. Sixty years later, Lev Sergeyeich Theremin himself patiently taught me to play
the instrument he had invented in 1920!
let us return from this digression to the 1920s. My parents could not
provide me with enough funds to acquire new, expensive radio parts. We had
only enough money for new shoes and clothes (I was growing rapidly) and for
new textbooks—and I still needed skates and skis! Father gave me money for
literature on radios separately. I bought all three of the popular radio journals
that were published at that time: Radio Enthusiast, Radio for Everyone,and Radio
News. 4 In order to read serious literature, I headed after school to the reading
room at the Lenin Library, which was located in the famous Pashkov House,
and from force of habit still often called the Rumyantsev Library. I often sat
there late into the evening over the journal Wireless Telegraph and Telephone,John
Moorcroft’s Electronic Tubes, and novelties of radio engineering literature. 5 Sometimes
I did not have enough knowledge to read such works, especially when
they involved higher mathematics!
Beginning in 1923, book fairs were held on Tverskoy Boulevard once a year.
There you could acquire the latest literature at lower prices. When I became a
schoolboy, my parents looked over the literature syllabus for the next three years,
checked through our home library, and drew up a list of the Russian classics we
lacked. After providing me with money,they instructed me to go to Tverskoy Boulevard
and buy the most inexpensive publications on the list.Imagine their anger when
I revealed that, instead of Hero of Our Times, Rudin, and collected poems of Nekrasov,
Blok, and Bryusov, I had bought six small books from a series on theoretical physics
published in Berlin. 6 During this domestic scandal my older cousin advised my father
to hide the expensive editions of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and eight leatherbound
volumes of Gogol, lest I exchange them for amateur radio literature. During
the wartime relocations we were unable to keep the unique edition of Tolstoy, but
of the eight volumes of Gogol, only one disappeared. Five of the small volumes of
the 1923 edition of Theoretical Physics are still in my library, intact to this day.
4. In Russian, the titles were Radiolyubitel (Radio Enthusiast), Radio vsyem (Radio for Everyone), and Novosti
radio (Radio News).
5. The Russian title was Telegrafiya i telefoniya bez provodov (Wireless Telegraph and Telephone).
6. Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov (1821-1877), Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (1880-1921), and Valeriy
Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873-1924) were famous Russian poets of the 19th century.The latter two were part of
the Russian symbolist movement.
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