When Vladimir the Great died in 1015, his sons turned on one another. Vladimir had scattered them across his realm to govern - Yaroslav north in Veliky Novgorod, Mstislav far south in Tmutarakan on the Sea of Azov. Their brother Sviatopolk seized the throne in Kyiv and earned a name that would follow him through the centuries: the Accursed. He had three of his brothers killed, among them Boris and Gleb, who became the first saints of the Rus' Orthodox Church, their murders remembered as martyrdom. Yaroslav defeated Sviatopolk and drove him out. But the killing had cleared the board only for the two strongest brothers to face each other, and Mstislav now rode north to claim his share.

Mstislav marched on Kyiv, but the Kyivans would not have him, so he fell back to Chernihiv. Yaroslav answered by hiring an army of Varangians - Norse warriors - under a commander named Yakun, and led them south. The two forces met at Listven, north of Chernihiv, in the storm the chronicle would make famous. Mstislav fought with the Severians, the local Slavic people of the region, and it was they and his own retinue who broke Yaroslav's line. The Varangians were shattered; Yaroslav fled the field. The battle survives mainly through the account written under the year 1024 in the Primary Chronicle, set down about ninety years later - a legendary telling, half history and half memory, of a night no one who lived through it would forget.

What makes Listven remarkable is what did not happen next. Mstislav had won, yet neither brother could truly master the other or rule alone from Kyiv. So two years later they did something rare in that violent age: they divided the land by agreement rather than by the sword. They drew the boundary along the Dnieper, Yaroslav taking the western Right Bank, Mstislav the eastern Left Bank with his seat at Chernihiv. It held. The brothers ruled side by side, apparently in peace, until Mstislav died in 1036 - and only then did Yaroslav, the man who had lost the storm at Listven, become sole ruler of all Kievan Rus', reigning from Kyiv until his death in 1054.