Sherlock Holmes in Russia

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).