Sherlock Holmes in Russia (2 page)

However, other times were approaching; mass culture had arrived and in 1907, in Russia, a Sherlock Holmes to whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had no connection, was fated to appear.

Roman Kim, a wonderful Russian writer, who also popularized detective fiction, has a story,
The Case of the Murder of the
Great Detective
, (1966). It tells a story which ostensibly took place in April, 1906, on the estate of Conan Doyle. This is the plot. Once, his mother appears without warning, accompanied by an unknown young American lady. His mother explains that the lady is Aurora Killarney, that she teaches algebra in a Philadelphia suburb, and that she is a great fan of Sherlock Holmes. The old lady adds that Aurora persuaded her to introduce her to her son and they both intend to stay with him the whole of the coming week. In the course of that week, a series of mysterious happenings occur and there are a number of conversations the substance of which Conan Doyle cannot comprehend at first. In the end, it transpires that during Conan Doyle’s absence (which was a carefully put-up job), someone had gone through his study, rummaged through all the cupboards and examined all his manuscripts. Conan Doyle is perplexed, but at the end of the story, two days after the uninvited American guest has gone, he gets a letter from her which explains everything. It transpires that Aurora worked for an American publisher. In the wake of the success of ‘Dime novels’ featuring Nick Carter, which is published by their rival, they had decided to publish their own series. But, so as not to have to publicize the name of an unknown detective, they had decided to give him the world famous name of Sherlock Holmes. There was, however, one thing which stood in the way. Sir Arthur was not to kill off
Sherlock Holmes as had already happened once. To ensure this, Aurora was despatched across the ocean. Meeting Mrs Doyle, she had charmed her with her incredible knowledge of Sherlockiana and told the old lady the dreadful (untrue) secret, that rumour had it that her son planned to kill off Sherlock Holmes for the second time, and this time for good. Mrs Doyle, who had always been against her son’s intention, got terribly angry and accepted the suggestion made by the American to search the writer’s study and find either the proof or disproof of this dreadful rumour. Mrs Doyle, under an invented pretext, sends her son and his secretary away. She lets in the wily American and stands watch at the door. When Aurora has completed her search, she gives Mrs Doyle the dreaded news: Conan Doyle, in fact, has a story all ready in which the great detective perishes right under the eyes of his friend, Dr Watson. Moreover, he dies a terrible death. Mrs Doyle nearly faints, but now she must carry out the last item in the plan laid by the crafty American. The mother must make Conan Doyle swear under oath never to kill off Sherlock Holmes. This is done. Now the American publisher can be easy in his mind. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes will live and, thereafter, their own Sherlock Holmes can flourish.

There is no way of telling whether any of this is true and, if so, is this how it all took place? Was it the plot that worked?

Conan Doyle’s literary agent was the exceptional A.P. Watt. It is unlikely he would have allowed this. But whatever it was that occurred, a False Sherlock Holmes appeared up and down Europe, especially in Germany. Dime novels became all the rage in Germany and, very quickly, this example of mass culture spread like a tidal wave to Russia.

This is described by Kornei Chukovsky, the classic Russian children’s writer. He was a great fan of English literature and Conan Doyle. In 1916, he was in London, where he met Sir Arthur and even strolled along Baker Street in his company.
(Much, much later, in the war years and their aftermath, when there was little or no detective literature in Russia, together with the Soviet publishing house Children’s Literature, Chukovsky popularized Conan Doyle. In 1959, he introduced Sherlock Holmes anew to a fresh generation of readers. He edited and wrote a new introduction to a 623-page collection,
Notes About
Sherlock Holmes
, still in print to this day.)

The success of mass culture was described by Chukovsky in his book,
Nat Pinkerton and Contemporary Literature
, (St Petersburg, 1908) as a thoroughly unwelcome phenomenon. ‘This invasion, this wave, this flood…. Our intelligentsia suddenly vanished … for the first time in a century our youth had neither “ideas” nor a “programme” … in art, pornography reigns, and in literature, riff-raff have taken over … some primitive has appeared out of nowhere and has swallowed up, in a year or two, our literature and art.’

Chukovsky referred to mass culture as the literature of a multimillion primitives. In 1907, a new deity appeared, namely the Russian equivalent of the American dime novel, which had appeared in 1860 and became particularly popular with the dawn of a new century. These, known as ‘penny novels’ (from the Russian word for grosh, the equivalent of a penny) had come from Germany. They then began their existence in Warsaw (in Polish, Poland being part of the Russian empire) and then, in the autumn of 1907, penetrated the heart of the Russian empire. It all began in September, early October. In that short interval, the first of several detective series appeared: in Petersburg,
Pinkerton, Ace
Detective
, also in Petersburg, a Russian novel in separate parts by an anonymous author,
In the Trap of Crime. The Murder of Countess
Zaretzkaya
; in Warsaw, a long, sensational novel based on the notes of the famous German agent of the CID, Gaston Rene and also in Germany,
Sherlock Holmes; His Sojourn in Germany or The
Secret of the Red Mask
And, again in Petersburg, a series of forty-eight stories appeared in booklet form under the general title,
From the Secret Documents of the Famous Detective Sherlock Holmes.

This new Sherlock Holmes, as Chukovsky so aptly noted, ‘took away from the [original] Sherlock Holmes his violin, threw off his shoulders the last that was left of Childe Harold’s cloak, took away all human emotions and notions, gave him a revolver and said, “Keep on shooting and let there be lots of blood. If you shoot, shoot them dead … you’ll get paid for your heroism. And no need for your Baker Street, get an office.” Kornei Chukovsky’s bitterness was genuine. The False Sherlock Holmes of anonymous writers did not have an iota of the human feelings for which the real Sherlock Holmes was liked so much. But, points out Leonid Borisoff, who wrote Conan Doyle’s biography in Russian, ‘in contradistinction to Nat Pinkerton, the authors of the Holmes stories, sometimes even educated writers, wrote better’.

The success of these penny dreadfuls was phenomenal. For an entire generation of Russian boys, these cheap booklets were the brightest events of their childhood and boyhood. Unsurprisingly, the demand grew to become a phenomenon on a national scale. In 1908, these Russian equivalents of penny dreadfuls increased to unprecedented numbers. Entertainment, the Petersburg publisher, alone issued 3,334,000 copies. It ranked third in the number of publications amongst 140 publishers. In 1908, a book exhibition in St Petersburg maintained that in that year Russia published 12,000,000 of these ‘grosh’ (i.e. penny) booklets. Individual booklets had print runs of 75,000 and even 200,000. And this at a time when the average print run for a book was not above 3,000 copies. Following the first Pinkertons and Sherlock Holmes, there appeared immediately in Russia Nick Carter (the American Sherlock Holmes), Lord Lister (the Police Terror), Jean Lecoq (the first living international detective), Bill Cannon (the famous American Police Inspector), Vidocq (the famous French detective), Harriet Bolton-Wright (woman detective), Treff (Russia’s top detective), Count Stagart (German detective), Ethel King (female Sherlock Holmes), Avno Azeff
(anarchist detective), the nameless detective of the Black Hundreds (the notorious anti-Semitic gangs) and many, many others. Their name is legion. Smart publishers and smart writers all used famous detectives and non-detectives, literary heroes and real people, turning them into the heroes of their penny dreadfuls, trying to turn a penny out of a big name. Of course, one of the most popular ‘victims’ of their trade was Sherlock Holmes.

Today, major Russian libraries haven’t a hundredth of all such literature published in Russia. This is why it is impossible to account for the number of Sherlock Holmes series. But from what we know now, of major series (i.e. five or more issues) in 1907–1910 there were more than a score. The most famous, with the greatest number, was N. Alexandroff’s publishing house Entertainment, which was in the vanguard of mass literature and the main supplier of penny dreadfuls. From 5 April 1908 to 3 April 1910, Entertainment published twenty-eight Sherlock Holmes stories, whose combined print run came to 2,261,000 copies.

Some stories were translated or home-made, but whether the authors were Russian or foreign, the action was always abroad. But very soon Russian authors began to display a new method of ‘borrowing’ someone else’s hero. They ‘sent off’ the great Baker Street detective (or was it his ‘double?’) to far-away Russia! What could be simpler! Now Sherlock Holmes speaks Russian fluently and conducts his investigations in different corners of Russia!

It all began on 19 January 1908, when the Petersburg newspaper
Stock Exchange News
began to publish Sherlock Holmes in Petersburg by an anonymous author. This was followed by three more Holmes’ stories. Their success was to come when they were reprinted as a supplement to
Stock Exchange News
, being part of the magazine
Ogoniok.
The first issue (of 23 March) contained
Sherlock Holmes in Moscow
. The introduction read, in part, ‘The manuscript arrived under somewhat mysterious
circumstances. “I am sending
Sherlock Holmes in Moscow
, a narrative of his Moscow adventures, by registered post”, read the unsigned telegram.’ A later issue carried an indignant letter from Sherlock Holmes to the editorial board of
Ogoniok
. In it, he demanded that the anonymous author must be stopped. The success of the hoax was palpable. There even arose a case,
Sherlock Holmes vs. the Magazine Ogoniok
, which many readers accepted as genuine. But S. Propper, the publisher of the magazine, achieved his aim. The popularity of the magazine grew. It also set a precedent. Now it became permissible to ‘transplant’ Sherlock Holmes to Russia and for his services to be commissioned by Russian clients. And so it went on and on….

The poor devil from Baker Street, against his will, covered the length and breadth of Russia! Russian authors ‘despatched’ him to Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Baku, Simbirsk, Penza, Novorossiisk, Tomsk, to small provincial towns and even the villages of the vast Russian empire. But, unlike the penny dreadfuls, these nearly always carried the author’s name, sometimes only a pseudonym. And another distinction, now these were not short stories but longer works, novels and even plays. The literary level of these creations was not high, but there were some examples of quality. One example of the latter was
Sherlock
Holmes in Penza
, in the April–May, 1908 issue of
Penza News.
Another example was
From the Memoirs of a Resident of Petersburg
, about Sherlock Holmes, containing
The Three Emeralds of
Countess V.-D
., by someone called N. Mihailovitch. This deals with the unknown circumstances following the epic struggle between Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, when Holmes disappeared over the waterfall. Mihailovitch tells us, for most of that time, Holmes was in Russia, where he lived as William Mitchell. The plot deals with the mysterious murder which took place in Petersburg. The story was not without a curious addition. It includes the presence of the daughter of Arsene Lupin! This sort of thing did happen frequently enough when the character of
one detective novel could become simultaneously Sherlock Holmes and Nat Pinkerton and Nick Carter and Arsene Lupin.

There were many stories of a ‘Russian’ Sherlock Holmes. Presented in this volume are two by P. Orlovetz. From his surname we might surmise that he came from the city or region of Oriol. He was a prolific writer, author of novels and novellas, short stories and children’s stories. Little is known of him.

But the most popular and most prolific was P. Nikitin, whose stories are presented in this volume. His span of literary activity was very short, from 19 July 1908 (the publication of the first collection,
The Latest Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Russia. From
the Notebooks of the Great Detective
), till 30 May 1909 (when the last collection came out,
On the Track of Criminals. The Adventures
of the Resurrected Sherlock Holmes in Russia
). In less than a year altogether, P. Nikitin published four collections. In the intervals between their publication, the entire cycle appeared (on the analogy of penny dreadfuls in separate small booklets but in a much more attractive format) in two series,
The Latest Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes in Russia
, and
The Resurrected Sherlock Holmes in
Russia
. All in all, Nikitin published twenty-one stories.

P. Nikitin may have been the most prolific and interesting of the authors of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, but, sad to say, we know absolutely nothing about him. Who was he? Where did he spring from?’ What does the initial ‘P’ stand for? Peter, Paul, Policarp? Not one writers’ reference work, not a single encyclopedia, nowhere is his name to be found. We don’t even know whether Nikitin is his real name or a pseudonym.

Time has not preserved either any information about him, or his books. The Russian National Library in St Petersburg, Russia’s major library, has only one set of his stories. How gratifying, therefore, that the name of this deserving but forgotten writer now returns before the reading public, and so much more gratifying that it is to the readers of that country whose great representative he extolled and which he probably never visited.
But now, a century later, he returns there by way of his works, returns to invite ‘his’ hero’s fellow countrymen and all English readers everywhere to that distant and mysterious Russia which, once upon a time, took to its heart that great recluse from Baker Street.