The Reception of Arthur Conan Doyle's Works in Siberian Pre-Revolutionary Literature (Based on Novels by Valentin Kuritsyn)

The aim of this work is to trace the reception of Arthur Conan Doyle's works in Tomskie trushchoby [The Tomsk Slums], a novel of the Siberian writer Valentin Kuritsyn. The novel is analysed both at the level of characters and at the level of genre "intersections" of the English classical detective and the Siberian "criminal novel". Tomskie trushchoby is actually a cycle of adventure novels written by the Tomsk writer Kuritsyn (whose pseudonym was Ne-Krestovsky) published on the pages of the local newspaper Sibirskiye otgoloski in 1907-1910. The cycle consists of three works by Kuritsyn: Tomskie trushchoby [The Tomsk Slums], Chelovek v maske [The Man in the Mask], Vpogone za millionami [Chasing the Millions]. All these works have a common system of characters and a common plot, which allows considering them as a single text under the general name Tomskiye trushchoby. Using a comparative analysis, the author explores Conan Doyle's famous series about the detective Sherlock Holmes and Kuritsyn's criminal novels based on the local material according to the following parameters: the system of characters, the chronotope, detective motifs, plot lines; special research attention is paid to typological features inherent in a detective story. The study allows concluding that the Siberian novelist Kuritsyn (Ne-Krestovsky) in many ways "borrowed" the genre features of the classical detective story formed in the works of Conan Doyle. The assimilation (reception) of Doyle's creative discoveries allowed the novice author Kuritsyn to expand the genre and plot frames of his novel and fit it into the literary tradition. Conan Doyle's and Kuritsyn's works have a number of common typological features characteristic of a detective story: the intellectual battle between the criminal and the detective, the absence of a love affair, the documentary basis of the works, a similar approach to building the chronotope of the work, and a number of others. However, there were fundamental differences due to the chosen criminal novel genre of Tomskiye trushchoby: the plot of Kuritsyn's novel is based on the activity of a criminal group. Thus, despite the genre features common with Conan Doyle's works, Kuritsyn did not write a classical detective story, but rather used a detective motive, which correlates with the motives of mystery, riddle, puzzle. Kuritsyn also took into account the specificity of the Tomsk reader, and added local flavour to the novel. Such a synthesis of an adventurous, criminal and detective story allowed Kuritsyn to feel quite free in the genre space of the novel Tomskiye trushchoby to combine different literary traditions.

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