Within the school practice of teaching literature the historical and cultural context of a work tends to remain background information, whereas the regulatory requirements for learning outcomes presuppose a formed ability of the student to perceive a literary text as evidence of its epoch and as a fact of national cultural memory. The discrepancy between the declared connection of literature and history and its actual realisation at the level of a single lesson constitutes the research problem. The aim of the work is to construct a structural and functional model of historical and cultural competence formed by means of nineteenth-century Russian literature and to determine the didactic conditions of its effective development. Conceptual and categorial analysis, structural and functional modelling, comparison of didactic approaches and content analysis of the current regulatory framework of general education were applied. Four interrelated components of the competence are distinguished – cognitive, axiological, interpretive and activity-based, and reflexive – and it is established that their formation is ensured not by accompanying historical commentary but by a specially organised movement from a fact of the epoch to its artistic refraction and back to a value-based generalisation. It is shown that nineteenth-century works possess unequal potential with respect to different components of the competence, so that the selection of material follows a functional and didactic rather than a chronological principle. The ability to correlate the artistic world of a work with the reality that produced it develops as an independent educational outcome arising at the intersection of literary and historical knowledge and not reducible to their mere sum.