Poetics of Russian translations of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective story "The adventure of the speckled band"

The article considers peculiar features found in Russian translations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detec-tive short story The Adventure of the Speckled Band done at the end of the 19th century. Creative writing of Conan Doyle as the author of short stories and novels about famous Sherlock Holmes had a great impact on the evolution of the detective fiction genre, which has been of great interest for readers and researchers in Russia. Numerous translations, made since the end of the 19th century, indicate the particularly important role of the English writer in the context of the formation and development of Russian-English relationships in the sphere of literature and the dialogue of the cultures. The paper deals with translations published in the weekly illustrated literary magazine Zvezda and a literary supplement to the Niva magazine. The research is based on the material being significant in terms of translation reception because translations reveal not only the attitude of the translator to the original work and its author but also the pecu-liarities in the perception of foreign literature by the Russian reader at a definite historical period of time. The analysis of the translations under study clearly shows various approaches to conveying the con-tent of the fiction works, aimed at adapting the detective stories to the Russian environment. The translations are characterized by practically literal interpretation of the plot, loose handling of the source text, introduction of Russisms, used to achieve the mentioned aim. The article explains the reasons for the existence of the diffe-rent approaches and peculiarities in Russian translations. The paper provides a successive analysis of how the key elements of Conan Doyle’s poetics - from the story title to the image of the narrator, characteristics of the main heroes, as well as spatiotemporal settings of the story - are rendered into the Russian language.