Sherlock Holmes had a long pedigree in Russian literature long before 1917. As the premier literary detective, Doyle's creation enjoyed a very long life in Russia both before and after the Revolution. The complete Holmes canon had been translated and went through three editions by 1908. Moreover, there were also various unlicensed versions of Holmes in Russian penny dreadfuls and pulp fiction. P. Nikitin along with P. Orlovets wrote a series of Holmes stories that became collected as Sherlock Holmes in Russia in which the great detective found himself enthralled by Russia after meeting some Russian emigrants and deciding to visit the empire. Nikitin produced some 21 Holmes stories, but the author was just one of several Holmes writers in the Silver Age. One Holmes Russian story reflected both Russian readers' growing global connections as well as a sense of dark humor as the author's pseudonym was simply Not Doyle.

Despite occasional grumbles among Soviet cultural gatekeepers, Holmes stories, as well as Agatha Christie's novels, were reprinted after 1917 and found a wide Soviet readership. The Doyle estate actually tried to sue Soviet publishers in the RSFSR Supreme Court for copyright violations in 1958-59. The Doyle estate argued that under Section 399 RSFSR Civil Code, plaintiffs have a right to remuneration derived from unjust enrichment since Soviet publishing houses never informed the Doyle estate they were printing Holmes stories. The Doyle estate claimed that the Soviets had sold some 5 million copies of Doyle's work and demanded an equivalent restitution. But in a pattern familiar to other cases of Soviet violations of Western intellectual property, the Soviet Supreme Court decided in favor of the state. But aside from illustrating the difficulties of Soviet copyright law, the Doyle case also reflected the enduring popularity of Holmes in the USSR that transected the divide between the tsarist empire and Soviet Union.

In many ways, Holmes along with other detectives like Miss Marple, resonated with the Soviet weltanschauung. Holmes is not an agent of Queen Victoria or even monopoly capital, but rather a maverick the authorities turn to when they are flummoxed. Additionally, Holmes's methods were that of science and logical deduction, not intuition, which positions him among the progressive elements of the nineteenth century. Western detective fiction also had the advantage of taking place in the West. The official Soviet position was that crime as a sociological phenomena was a symptom of capitalism. Murders among aristocrats, imperialists, and other Victorian elites in the Holmes stories exposed the underbelly of capitalist society.

But Holmes also tapped into the late Soviet zeitgeist in ways that were not always so edifying to the state and its ideology. Holmes's maverick qualities stood him in opposition to the conventional and hidebound bureaucracy of Scotland Yard, a metaphor that could stand in for the bloated apparatchiks of the Brezhnev era. This aspect of the Holmes legacy is evident in one of the most popular cultural milestones of the Brezhnev was the Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring in which its protagonist, Max Otto von Stierlitz, is a double-agent in Nazi Germany. Although many Western commentators liken Stierlitz to James Bond, the Soviet spy did not rely upon gadgetry to get out of a jam, but his wits. Additionally, Stierlitz has to rely upon methods of logical deduction much as Holmes did. One of the notable elements of Seventeen Moments of Spring was that Stierlitz's bosses were rather lost without their hero, much like Inspector Lestrade. Finally, Seventeen Moments of Spring had a retrospective voice-over narration, much like the Holmes stories used Watson's recollections as a framing structure.

The enduring popularity of Western detective fiction as well as the huge success of Seventeen Moments of Spring ensured that Holmes would find his way to Soviet television screens in the Lenfilm miniseries known collectively as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that aired in the 1970s and 80s. These adaptations played up some of Holmes's dark humor, which was something that made Stierlitz infamous both in the miniseries and in various Soviet jokes. Television Holmes also had the benefit of timing in this late Soviet era resurgence. The BBC miniseries The Forsyte Saga had aired with great success on Soviet television and there was a renewed public interest in British period fiction. Aside from some alterations, Watson's service in Afghanistan was changed to "the East", The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes took great care to faithfully reproduce the original stories for Soviet audiences as well as its nineteenth-century costuming. The final Holmes cycle, The Twentieth Century Approaches not only featured three Holmes stories, but also visual clues of the twentieth century's conflicts besides its ominous title. Mycroft Holmes, who had a larger role than in the stories, fidgets with gas masks and other technological terrors and the final stories have Holmes thwarting German spies. At the end of the installment, the everyman Watson muses to his friend:

I long for the good old days. All those robbers, killers, rapists, that you caught over the last century seem like innocent children compared to the wolves we've met recently. One can steal a million, or kill a rich uncle- I can understand that. But I cannot understand a high rank scoundrel who pushes millions of people to war for the sake of a little profit. I don't care if it's a German Baron or an English lord. How can we mere mortals- you, me, Mrs. Hudson- stop this horror? I don't like it at all.

After finishing his monologue, Watson taps the MacGuffin safe upon which a mechanical clicking reveals the combination: August 1914. Holmes reassures his friend that the new century will be one of hope despite Watson's apprehensions and the miniseries closes with the two men watching a cinema piece of a man and woman dancing on a pier to ragtime music.

This final shot of an adaptation of "His Last Bow", written by Doyle during the First World War, reversed a number of elements from the original story. In the original, Holmes was worried that he had uncovered the tip of the iceberg of German perfidy on the eve of the war, while Watson naively thinks they have just solved another case. Holmes then gently chides Watson for being a "fixed point" that needs to see the new age. But in The Twentieth Century Approaches, it is Holmes who is naive as he feels that the century will be one of hope. It is Holmes in the Soviet adaptation who is "the one fixed point in a changing age" and not Watson. Given that much of the twentieth century bore out Watson's vision and a good many of the miniseries's Soviet audience lived through these times, Holmes's naivete was a form of nostalgia for a twentieth-century turning point that failed to turn despite the many hopes invested in it.

Sources

Hutchings, Stephen C., and Anat Vernitski. Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001: Screening the Word. London: Routledge, 2005.

Levitsky, Serge L. Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law. Leyden: A.W. Sythoff, 1964.

McReynolds, Louise. Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.