The book examines the reliability of information from the oldest Russian chronicles used to reconstruct the events of the early centuries of Russian history. This volume constitutes the first part, dedicated to the analysis of the structure, chronology, terminology and stylistics of “The Tale of Bygone Years”, questions of its authorship, the number of editions, their volumes, dates and probable time of composition of the final text. The book is intended for specialists in the history of Russia, literary historians, university teachers, students, as well as a wide range of readers interested in these issues. Recommended as a manual for seminar classes.* * *The book contains tables and Greek letters (included in the regular WGL4 standard Unicode fonts). To make reading easier, the Old Church Slavonic digraph “ou” has been replaced with “ŷ” (for example, moukou vechnoyu → mŷkŷ vechnyu).