K. Chukovsky was one of Russia’s first scholars of detective fiction. Yet his literary criticism on this particular topic has never been researched. Nor has it come to light that his attitude to the genre was ambivalent. On the one hand, he knew it very well, was a regular reader of detective stories and made a number of valuable observations about the works of Conan Doyle (whose writing he contrasted with the cheap sensationalist books about Nat Pinkerton, stressing the quality of logic in Conan Doyle’s stories) and Wilkie Collins. On the other hand, he often made very critical and ironic remarks about the genre, confessing that he failed to comprehend the reason for its popularity. The article suggests the grounds for Chukovsky’s attitude: he argued that literature was linked to ‘the most important personal experience’ (in the words of the writer N. Oleynikov), with entertaining literature automatically dismissed as an outsider to real art.