Object of a research interest is the literary history of the so called Third Russian revision of the Tarnovo prologue vita of the national Bulgarian St. John of Rila. The revision is resented in six copies from the end of the 15th to the 17th century (the earliest in prologue for September – February from the end of the 15th century, RNB, Main assembly, No F. I. 297) and it is distributed in collections with permanent and mixed structure: in prologues about the winter half of the church year, in codex with vitas, instructions and stories, in collections with services and vitas. Discussed are issues about the Third revision of the Prologue, whose origin is connected with the literature of Novgorod and Pskov, and in whose composition we find the earliest copies of the new version. In the Bulgarian, Serbian and Moldovan-Romanian hagiographic tradition this version is not known. The new version of the Tarnovo prologue vita later penetrates the literature of the Moscow state and the Moscow cultural centers, and its distribution continues in the 16th and 17th century. In this way it turns into a significant element of the entire cult of the Bulgarian saint in the medieval Slavonic Cyrillic tradition. The results from the textological study of the copies and the interrelations between the separate texts have been presented.