Sherlock Holmes in Russia

 
Dedicated to all
aficionados
of the Sherlock Holmes canon

In the official biography of Sherlock Holmes, written by his Boswell and loyal friend Dr Watson, there is only one mention of the great detective’s arrival in Russia. In
A Scandal in Bohemia
we are told that he visited Odessa in connection with ‘The Case of the Trepoff Murder’. But in the short passage offered to the reader below, light is cast on certain circumstances of another, longer and less well-known trip, which the Baker Street consulting detective undertook to this distant and mysterious but, nonetheless, wonderful country. Paradoxical as it may sound, this journey was simultaneously virtual and real. The information concerning this visit is fragmentary and most of it has vanished in the mists of time. But the circumstances of this visit do excite curiosity, are not without interest and, surely, are worth a few pages and minutes of time. And so….

12 December 1893. Tuesday. St Petersburg. Let us imagine a clear winter’s day. Our boots crunch the white snow, the frost crackles and bites, but the cold air is filled with sunshine and laughter. The streets and boulevards of the city of Peter the Great are filled with happy, merry, passers-by. They are all smiles and full of the joy of life, because the New Year is nigh. The New Year in Russia is a very special festival, joyful and unclouded, because the Russian irrational
perhaps
is as eternal as the fierce
faith in it, the belief in
perhaps
better times, a magic time of change. Why, it is part of nature! Midnight will chime, a New Year will dawn and happiness and success are on their way. In Russia, the first days of the New Year turn the most convinced sceptic into a romantic who, in the depths of his soul, believes that every cherished dream will be fulfilled. Hark to those midnight chimes!

But that will be on 31 December and this is 12 December, the honeyed eve of the festival, the festive awaiting of the festival, the anticipation of which is, at times, more pleasurable than its actual arrival.

It was on such a day that there occurred an unnoticed but a very important event. Sherlock Holmes arrived in Russia.

The immortal private detective from Baker Street, called to life by the inquisitive mind, rich imagination but, also, material needs of a modest Southsea doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, first appeared before his readers in November, 1886, on the pages of
A Study in Scarlet
, which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. But the march to immortal fame was to come only five years later. In July, 1891,
The Strand Magazine
, recently founded by the perspicacious George Newnes, published the first of fifty-six stories (known today as Sherlockiana or The Canon). This was
A Scandal in Bohemia
. Its success was phenomenal! Humungous! Two or three more months, two or three more stories and the new literary hero had conquered the country, a lasting conquest, perhaps, forever. Two and a half years later his fame reached Russia.

This happened, as you and I now know, on 12 December, 1893. That was the day on which the fortieth issue of a popular magazine,
The Star
, came out. It was published by Piotr Petrovitch Soikin, a devoted fan of adventure stories. Soikin was the first to introduce Sherlock Holmes to Russia’s reading public and, having done so, this eminent worthy continued to bring Sherlock Holmes’s exploits before the public through his magazines
Nature & People
, as well as
The World of Adventure
, which were the first to publish every new exploit. From February to November 1909 Soikin brought out in five thousand pages (twenty volumes) The Complete Works of Conan Doyle and followed this up with two additional volumes.

And so, the Russian reader became acquainted, for the first time, with a Russian-speaking Sherlock Holmes in
The Speckled
Band,
when
The Star
was published.

The new literary hero must have been received well, because the following year saw the publication in
The Star
of
The
Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
and
The Adventure of the Blue
Carbuncle
. In 1876 the baton passed from
The Star
to the popular Russian publication
Niva
(
The Field
), which hospitably opened its pages to the
Red-Headed League
and (yet again)
The Blue
Carbuncle.
A year later
Niva
No. 5 of 31 January 1898, published
Professor Moriarty, The Adventure of the Final Problem
. On 23 February 1898, in Petersburg – hurrah! – the first Sherlock Holmes stories in book form, a 143-page collection entitled
Notes
from the Famous Detective
and consisting of
The Adventure of Silver
Blaze
,
The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’
and
The Adventure of the
Reigate Squires
. In December of the same year, as part of a 12-volume free monthly supplement to the Petersburg newspaper
Dawn, A Study in Scarlet
was published in Russia for the first time. It was translated from German(!), so it wasn’t entirely surprising that the hero’s surname sounded somewhat Spanish, Golmez, and that he lives on Bakkerstrasse and is referred to as Herr.

Such were the steps the great London detective was to take on Russian soil. It didn’t spell success as yet. Let’s call it a preliminary acquaintanceship, timid, coincidental, but what is coincidence if not a rod thrown at the wheel of fate speeding towards a prepared place in the universe.

And the place made ready in Russia for Conan Doyle’s brilliant creation was no less enviable than the one in his native
land. What had started as a coincidence, an accident, grew to become habitual. Sherlock Holmes made a lasting entry into Russian society.

Amongst those who were first to popularize Sherlock Holmes in Russia were the brothers Panteleyeff, who published a remarkable monthly magazine,
The Herald of Foreign Literature
. Working for this magazine were the best translators of the time, able to select the best new literature abroad and bring it to the attention (and judgement) of the Russian reading public. This is why, in 1901, as a supplement to their magazine, the Panteleyeffs issued, for the first time in Russia (and very probably in the world), a three-volume edition of the works of Conan Doyle, consisting of most of
The Canon
available at the time, viz, vol. 1,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Notes
; vol. 2,
The Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes
; and vol. 3,
From John Watson’s Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes
. A large number of the stories in this collection appeared in Russian for the first time, including
The Sign of Four
. This was, indeed, a unique edition but, in Russia today, there is hardly a library that has a complete set. The translations were the work of M.P. Voloshinova, to whom a very special thank you!

And so, at the start of the twentieth century, as the brilliant era of Queen Victoria was ending, the era of Sherlock Holmes was just getting under way in Russia.

While the 3-volume Panteleyeff edition was coming out in July, F.I. Miturnikoff, a Petersburg publisher, put out a 253-page
The Famous Detective’s Notes
.

And so, by the end of 1901, this is the Sherlock Holmes picture in Russia: six publications in magazine form, two books and a 3-volume set.

Now this was already something, but the major breakthrough was to come in the spring of 1902 when
The Strand Magazine
was to complete the publication of, arguably, the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes adventures,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. It was
the first after an eight-year silence brought about by the ‘death’ of the great detective when he went over the Reichenbach Falls. In a fit of unparalleled enthusiasm and loyalty, fans besieged the English and American editorial offices of
The Strand Magazine
. The issue flew all around the world at lightning speed, by post or whatever other means presented itself. Of course, it got to Russia. The success abroad was reflected in Russia, where it swept up and down the land. Russian publishers reacted instantaneously. There is a saying to the effect that, while it takes a while to harness horses, the actual ride is swift. This is how it was with this new Sherlock Holmes. The first edition of
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
came out in London on 25 March 1902 and by 10 April the Panteleyeff brothers had already received the necessary official permission from the Russian censor to publish a Russian translation. Less than a month later, the Panteleyeff brothers published, in the May edition, a new, fairly exact translation of it. One thousand copies were set side and sold in book form in June. A third edition of three thousand was published in September by D. Yefimoff’s publishing house in Moscow.

The success of the story (read Sherlock Holmes) amongst Russian readers was breathtaking and saw the start of Sherlockomania. Publishers began to publish anything they could lay their hands on and, during the short period between the summer of 1902 and the end of 1903, a score of books emerged. Incomplete data, just for the five years between 1902 and 1907, shows that no less than twenty publishers issued Sherlock Holmes. As regards the actual texts, one has to admit that, on the whole, the translations were weak, many were garbled, with bits and pieces of their own manufacture thrown in by translators. Few were worthy of the original. Amongst those that were an exception to the general rule, was a four-volume edition from V.I. Gubinsky entitled
The Adventures of the Detective
Sherlock Holmes
, which came out in Petersburg between 1902 and 1905. Every volume had a print run of 3,500, considerable for
Russia in those days. This edition went into three further printings in nearly double figures. A particular feature of this edition was that it was the first illustrated edition, showing the canonical ‘portrait’ of Sherlock Holmes by the German painter Richard Gutschmidt. The illustrations were taken from the 3-volume 1902 German edition published in Stuttgart by Robert Lutz Verlag.

In December, 1893, English and American readers were in a state of shock to read, in
The Adventure of the Final Solution
, of the premature death of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. Russian readers did not register the same sense of loss and shock because they had become acquainted with Sherlock Holmes later. Despite this, when Sherlock Holmes miraculously survived and returned, the interest and affection displayed was no less considerable than elsewhere. His triumphant return was now greeted with no less acclaim in Russia than abroad.
The
Adventure of the Empty House
, which records Holmes’s return, appeared in New York in
Colliers Weekly Magazine
on 26 September 1903, and already on 13 November of the same year, Soikin, in his magazine
Nature & People
published a translation.

The ‘resurrection’ of Sherlock Holmes only increased the sensational excitement in connection with him. New publishers, their finger on the public pulse, published Conan Doyle’s stories as soon as they appeared. For example, between January and September, 1904, the Panteleyeff brothers, in their revamped
New Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art
, published twelve of the thirteen stories which later became the collection known as
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
. Except that this time, Russian publishers decided to forestall events. The first edition of this collection of stories came out in New York in February, 1905, but in Russia it was already out in October, 1904 (but without
The Adventure of the Second Stain
).

The name of the private detective from Baker Street was not just a matter of renown, but it came to be used as a common noun. For three decades, a synonym for the word ‘detective’ had been
Monsieur Lecoq, agent of the Criminal Investigation police from the works of Emile Gaboriau, but now it became the eponym (and is still so to this very day), Sherlock Holmes. He cast a spell over the hearts and minds of thousands of Russian fans. He was no longer a creature of his creator, but now belonged to everybody, a supranational phenomenon. Wildly successful plays were staged of his exploits, little boys imitated him, adults tried to imitate his methods, he was parodied, his name graced signboards and goods labels. And everyone read accounts of his adventures, even members of royal families. The diary of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, records that he read the following (in the original) to his family,
The Valley of Fear
,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,
A Study
in Scarlet
,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. The Emperor read so-called ‘continental’ editions, published in English in Leipzig by the heirs of Baron von Tauchnitz. Today they have become priceless collectors’ pieces, though at one time the ones that got to Russia were sold abroad for pennies by ignorant and uncultivated Bolsheviks. Today they are safeguarded by the library of the University of Minnesota.

Sherlock Holmes became more than a literary hero. He became virtually real, an outstanding contemporary, a great expert in crime detection, a psychologist of great depth and a zealous man of science. There is an unusual brochure by the psychiatrist Michael Mayevsky,
Conan Doyle: The Adventures of
the Detective Sherlock Holmes
, Vilna, 1904. The psychiatrist had made a detailed study of the Sherlock Holmes stories, a detailed analysis of the psychological and professional aspect of the detective’s personality, examined his work methods in detail, and their underlying scientific basis. He pays particular attention to his powers of observation, logic, deductive and inductive thinking, how he comes to make correct conclusions. ‘These stories,’ writes Mayevsky, ‘represent a eulogy in praise of logic, in honour of man’s acute powers of observation, trained by considerable human experience … an example of penetration
into a single chosen sphere of knowledge … clearly, precisely and entertainingly set out … a collection of … subtle and witty intellectual conclusions.’ Holmes, says the author of the brochure, might be an amateur in his profession, however ‘by no means a dilettante, but a scholar of depth’.