The article attempts to explain which images of female atamans in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s take their origin in the personality of Marusya Nikiforova, the famous anarchist of the Russian Civil War period. The writers who were interested in this figure however ignored her individual features, turning her into a mythological image. Boris Pilnyak called the anarchist heroine of his story “Ice Drift” (1924) Marusya, but it was a collective image, whose prototypes were Nikiforova and Nestor Makhno’s wife Galina Kuzmenko. The heroine’s main features are the unknown biography, beauty, passion, success in battle, composure, superiority over men. The same qualities characterize the atamansha Lyolka in the Boris Lavrenev’s story “Wind” (1924). The sexual freedom of the chieftainess forms her reputation in this story in the same way as in Pilnyak’s work. The heroine is associated with the anarchist side of the revolution. Her femininity is constructed through the eyes of a male character who primarily sees her as an attractive sexual object. Some collective images of female anarchists are presented in the Ilia Selvinsky’s epic “Ulyalaevschina” (podatamanikha Maruska) and in the Eduard Bagritsky’s libretto of the opera “Duma about Opanas” (Raissa Nikolaevna). In other literary works, Nikiforova appears as a historical or legendary character, created mainly on the basis of rumors about atamansha’s activities. The artistic image of Marusya Nikiforova, as well as the biographical image restored by historians, generally appears to be fragmentary, mosaic, but the idea of the exclusivity and originality of this woman is formed.