Sherlock Holmes in Russia

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!