text:  Convinced of the importance to an author of history of a personal knowledge of the scenes in which his events took place Pushkin when the history of Pugatcheff's rebellion was already on the verge of completion determined (before his work was published) to examine with his own eyes that eastern region of European Russia which had been the theatre of the strange drama of that singular pretender's life and to enable himself to infuse into a narration founded upon dry records the life and reality which was to be obtained from questioning the old inhabitants of that country many of whom might remember the wild adventures of which in their youth they had been witnesses or actors