engleski

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth": The Case of Sherlock Holmes and his early 20th century Doppelgängers

This paper will present the findings of long-term archival research, carried out in the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection Lancelyn Green Bequest and the national libraries of Croatia and Slovenia, which inform the virtual exhibition “Sherlockovi dvojnici/ Sherlock’s Doppelgängers” at the National and University Library of Croatia in Zagreb (2022). In the narrative market of early 20th century Europe, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in translation faced tough competition in the shape of a mysterious, action-loving double. Initially advertised as Conan Doyle's own work and published in penny dreadful editions alongside the translations of his own stories about Holmes in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, the immensely popular series Detective Sherlock Holmes and His World-famous Adventures first appeared in 1907 in Germany and quickly spread across Europe and beyond. The stories competed with Doyle’s originals until a copyright court case was won by the Stuttgart-based publisher who owned the rights to the original stories (Ritzheimer 2016) ; however, the ruling did not prevent their re-publication – which continued until fairly recently – or the continued use of Sherlock Holmes as the character in new sequels. By mapping the outreach of this always already translated series, the paper will challenge the assumptions of recent world literature theories that posit London and Paris as the centres for literary dissemination and examine the figure of Holmes’s doppelgänger as a prototype for subsequent neo-Victorian re-visionings of Sherlock Holmes on screen.

appropriation, Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, pastiche, translation

nije evidentirano