Sherlock Holmes in Russia

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.’