Dmitry Furmanov, the commissar of the Chapayev Division, wrote his novel drawing largely on his diaries, personal observations, reminiscences of his contemporaries, and historical archives. But the documentary truth of Chapayev did not restrict the ideological and artistic merits of the novel: Furmanov created a work of immense capacity, far-reaching generalizations, a book about the revolutionary people - creator of their own history and their own heroes.