Valentina Bagozzi

This dissertation describes The Women’s Decameron by Iuliia Voznesenskaia as a legitimation of women’s authorship. Voznesenskaia achieves this goal through the creation of a communal narrative act springing from women’s nature-given generative force. This study highlights the link between motherhood and authorship by addressing the influence of the movement Mariia on the author’s ideological mindset and, consequently, in the creation of The Women’s Decameron. The bond between maternity and creativity is enforced by the choice of the maternity ward as the narrative space, documents from Voznesenskaia’s archival fund and the identification of maternity and creativity in the almanac Mariia. This interpretation differs from the author’s statements on the book presenting it entirely as a deterrent to the application of Soviet emancipatory policy in Western countries and as a piece of anticommunist satire. The author, under the appearance of social commentary literature, “concealed” a celebration of women’s right to authorship, of which women were often deprived either by the regime or by the subsidiary role imposed on women in Soviet official literature and samizdat literary circles. This study, therefore, also discusses the author’s mitigation of her ideological stance by addressing her uneven status as a woman writer in her public statements and the presence of textual variants in the edition of The Women’s Decameron.