The Povest&soft; vremennyx let (PVL) is an engaging yet complex venue for representing gender and private life in Kievan Rus&soft;. Private life and gender are themselves problematic terms within Russian historiography: gender has been under-researched in medieval scholarship, and the Western term private life must be examined alongside the Russian concept byt. This paper is indebted to Natal&soft;ja Pu&shachek;kareva's &Chachek;astnaja &zhachek;izn&soft; russkoj &zhachek;en&shachek;&chachek;iny, a groundbreaking work exhibiting both the promise and the peril of applying gender and private life studies to Rusian culture: how valid is her application of the Annales school conception of private life to a culture which conceived of the individual in a different manner? How is representation of private life influenced by the PVL, a document explicitly devoted to integrating the individual into a public and politicized conception of history? How are gender and private life complicated by the cultural ferment of pre-Mongol Kiev, in which differing cultural modes (paganism, Christianity, elite lifestyles, peasant lifestyles, oral tradition, literacy) all made claims on the image of the individual? Is private life a spatial or metaphorical entity in this period? These questions are answered by focusing on close readings of several passages from the PVL. In addition to the PVL, analyses by Pu&shachek;kareva, Eve Levin, Georges Duby, Jurij Lotman, Roman Jakobson, and Svetlana Boym show how theories of gender and private life can be applied in a manner compatible with the cultural milieux of Kievan Rus&soft;.