The hype over Sherlock Holmes began with the very publication of the stories themselves. It’s a fascinating history about what it means to love a story, to let it have power, and to be a fan (or a geek). To look back on the history of Sherlockianity (my word) is to look back on the emergence of a phenomenon and the formation of much of fandom as we know it today – and some of fandom as, perhaps, we haven’t conceived of it. Long before the possibilities of today’s mediated world, he was one of the first characters to massively, irrevocably, step off the page and into the world, and refuse to get back on the page. The kind of hype surrounding Sherlock today very much resembles the hysteria around the time the stories were originally published in fact, Sherlock Holmes is arguably responsible for much of fandom as we know it today. To lift the ban, Holmes' line about Watson being to Afghanistan had to be re-recorded to Watson being to "some Eastern country".Sherlock Holmes is – and has always been – nothing less than a phenomenon. Watson (ironically, the film is of Soviet production), because it referenced the war in Afghanistan. One work about Sherlock Holmes that was banned in USSR was the film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Maybe it happened to be in the same issue of Strand. Maybe Sherlock Holmes was rage-censored because of this novel. The Maracot Deep remained censored until 1990.Īs to how this is connected to Sherlock Holmes, I was able to find no evidence. Obviously, censors could not allow such speeches, so they had it reworked, and inserted some passages of their own. Rare times those, but they have been even better of late in Russia. I was the tall dark man who led the mob in Paris when the streets swam in blood. It was my whisper which burned ten thousand old crones whom the fools called witches. I was with the Saracens when under the name of religion they put to the sword all who gainsayed them. I was with the Huns when they laid half Europe in ruins. Where evil has been planned there have I ever been. I have powers, and they are not small ones. He attributes the censorship and changes done to the following passage, a speech by the the Lord of the Dark Face: It is said to see that such gifted writer has not only come to occultism, but also uses its naive tricks, which lack even the trace of originality and novelty.Īccording to Sherbakov, the bound issue of the Strand from 1929 was even missing from the library, where he went to read the last part of the novel in its original language. Taken from an interview with Soviet writer and translator Aleksandr SherbakovĬonan Doyle, who is taken an interest in occult lately, used so many "otherworldly" episodes and details in the ending of "The Maracot Deep" (including satanism and black magic!), that the editors of the "Pathfinder" had to resort to cutting some of the passages and dialogues in the last part of this novel, passages that are absolutely out of place on the pages of this journal, and make no sense for our readers, who will find discussions about "the eternal fight between good and evil" and mystical discussions about exorcism boring and laughable. In particular, every single reference to "The Lord of the Dark Face", and anything mystical, was purged, with the following note by editors: The last chapter, published in 1929, was severely reworked.
The novel was published in USSR in 7 chapters (while it was published in two parts in The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine before being collected in one book in 1929) from 1927 to 1929. However, searching the Russian Wikipedia article for censorship in USSR, I found an entry about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Maracot Deep. Searching for Doyle's works banned in USSR in 1929 yields nothing about The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, save for this question and one comment on LiveJournal.