The purpose of this paper is to provide a "decentered" reading, i.e. the "feminist" interpretation to the three seventeenth-century Russian tales, The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn, The Tale 01 Gore Zlochastie, and The Tale of Frol Skobeev, which share the archi-story of the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. The comparison of these tales with the biblical parable reveals that they have different goals and different points of view from those of the parable. The canonical interpretations of the tales have been consistently masculine (or, we may say, patriarchal), whether their approaches are sociological, mythological, or psychological. Setting up a linear model of Father and Son, these interpretations overlook the crucial role of the female in the deep structure of these tales. Therefore 1 propose a triangular model with the elements of Father, Son, and the Female. On the basis of this model 1 pursue the deeply underlying femininity within the Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. And then 1 proceed to establish the feminine subsσatum of these tales with relation to their folkloric elements. The analysis reveals that while Savva turns out to be the most Christian -like variant of the voIshebnaia skazka, Frol, a parody of the biblical parable, lies at the opposite as a carnivalized modem adaptation of the volshebnaia skazka. While Savva shows the process of oppression of the femininity, Frol depicts a realization of the principle of "joissance," the principle of the unconscious feminine world. As to Gore, the most complicated and polemical of the three, 1 hypothesize that there occurs a change of author's position within the process of the tale. With the appearance of Gore there occur shifts from (the parody of) bylina to Iyric. from the non-reality-statement to the subjective reality-statement, from the masculine to the feminine viewpoints. In spite of the above differences, the three tales share the feminine substratum, which is ultermately related with the search for the new literature and the interest in the folklore in the seventeenth-century Russia