The article deals with two texts of Pushkin, the chronicle “The History of Pugachev’s Rebellion” (1834) and the novel “The Captain’s Daughter” (1836), and proposes to regard them as a dialogical unity, allowing to reveal more fully the author’s intentions in understanding the historical past and the present. To demonstrate Pushkin’s twosided and cumulative approach, the article writer choses the image of Yemelyan Pugachev - the leader of the peasant uprising, on whose example the author shows how the historical text is compensated and corrected by the literary text, how the diffusion of narrative strategies (in “The Captain’s Daughter” - the narrator and publisher) brings the image of Pugachev beyond the regular realistic poetics and enriches the character of the hero.