Authors

Melaniia Kalinina¹;  ¹ -, Italy

Discussion

Iuliia Voznesenskaia (1940–2015) is mostly known as one of the key figures of the late Soviet feminist movement, a dissident who had been persecuted and imprisoned in the 1970s before emigrating to Western Germany in 1980. Twenty years later, in 2001, she published a novel My Postmortem Adventures, a text about the journey of a soul after death written from the perspective of a modern woman. The narrative is modelled on the ancient tradition of the journeys to the afterlife, but the life of the heroine resembles the biography of Voznesenskaia. The novel appears to be some kind of autofiction writing in which Christian heaven and hell transform into alternative dimensions of Russia. In this text, Voznesenskaia combines fascinating and ironic fictional narrative with scrupulous exposition of the Orthodox dogmatics and later produces more writings in this genre which she calls ‘Christian fantasy’. These texts pretend to construct a missionary vision of the Russian Orthodox community and prefigure its future existence. This paper will analyse these understudied works of Voznisenskaia in the literary, cultural, and social contexts of the Orthodox revival in post-Soviet Russia.