In my paper I will compare three excerpts from the Primary Chronicle (Tale of Bygone Years), the earliest written testimony (d. 1113) on the history of the formation of the East Slavic state, Kievan Rus. The Tale of the Death of Prince Oleg (used by Sabrina Spielren in her famous paper, “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens” (“Destruction as the Cause of Becoming”), the Tale of Murder of Boris and Gleb (first written account on entering martyrdom and Russian sainthood by means of voluntary sacrifice), and the Tale about Princess Olga, who mercilessly avenged the death of her husband, predestined the main direction in the treatise of death, which became central category in Eastern European consciousness, society and culture in the period from 9th to the middle of the 12th century.  I will demonstrate how historical attempts of establishing the “monopoly on legitimate violence” (Weber) yielded to the cultural practices of constructing uniquew Russian “narrative of death”, which presumably underlines the sanctification of suffering as an undeniably “Russian trait” (Fedorov).  Using Freud’s theory of death as spectatorship (Thought for the Times of War and Death), I will discuss the means of creating diegetic and non-diegetic space of violence, textual and cultural modes of identification (the author and the hero), structures of projection and representation in narrating the fantasy of immortality.