Modern Russian criminal novel is one of the most popular and wide-spread litetrary genres. Being highly charged with social stereotypes and commercially oriented, it allows to suggest that the author of a criminal novel as the political leader, appealing to the mass audience, use mythological constructions that were wide-spread in the post-soviet territory as a means of ultimate popularization of a product. Images of social and ethnic groups, mentioned in the criminal novel, are very similar to those that are described in the stuies of myth. So, a criminal novel reflects the process of mythogenesis in the contemporary Russia that’s expressed in the images of social and ethnic groups.