Sherlock Holmes in 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.