The article addresses how the archetypal image of the female warrior is transformed by Italo Calvino in his novel The Nonexistent Knight (1959). Bradamante, the heroine of this novel, derived from the pages of the Renaissance chivalric epic, primarily by Matteo Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, is considered against the background of the tradition of depicting female warriors, on the one hand, and the structure and semantics of the inner world of The Nonexistent Knight, on the other. The author reveals constant mythopoetic topoi associated with the representation of female warriors in general and Bradamante in particular: from characterological, the main of which is their increased agency, their ability to exercise direct power on a par with male characters, to those related to the plot. Among them are the motif of wearing male costume and / or armor; the topos of meeting in a battle, when the future lover of the female warrior does not know that the valiant knight is actually a woman; the topos of recognizing a maiden dressed as a warrior, in the forest, near a pond, during her bath; the love-enmity of two equal rivals and their duel; the motif of virginity of the female warrior; her ability to love only a hero equal to her or the strongest one; the reflection on masculine and feminine traits; the topos of the deceived warrior maiden, when her beloved, the strongest hero, is "substituted" by another. All these motifs appear in one way or another in Calvino's novel and, at the same time, are transformed in connection with the main problematic of the novel, defined by Calvino as "the conquest of being", the glorification of life in its unpreparedness, randomness, unpredictability, as well as with the genre The Nonexistent Knight, which belongs to the meta-novel type. It possesses all the constant motifs and themes of this genre, reflecting on the relationship between life and art: the dialectic of the author- historian, who only records the events of life, and the author-creator, demonstrating his power over the narrated world; the text's reflections on the problem of its own ending and its correlation with the end of life; the motif of justifying the world by the very fact of its existence; the theme of free will and predestination, chance and necessity; gradual "crystallization" of the narrator. In the end of the novel, the heroine-warrior, being an active character, metaphorically acting as the "author" of her own life and endowed with a high degree of agency, also turns out to be the explicit author of the entire story being told, thus becoming the main figure in the "conquest of being" in Calvino's novel, for she carries it out not only at the level of the plot, like Rambaldo and Torrismondo, but also at the level of narration itself.
