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| Three Matryoshkas from a series containing 30 pieces with the pictures illustrating Ruslan and Ludmila |
In 2001 was inaugurated, just in the Moscow's center, in the building of Russian Folk Arts Fund, where the first Matryoshka doll was created in the end of the XIX century, the Museum Of Russian Matryoshka, the first official collection of Matryoshka dolls in Russia. Matryoshka dolls are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size, placed one inside the other, and appeared in Russia at the end of 1890's, in a Moscow craft workshop named Children's Education, the first being carved by Vasily Zvyozdochkin, from a design by Sergey Malyutin. The concept was borrowed from Japan, but was further developed in Russia. Depending of the author's imagination, the themes for the decoration of nesting dolls were ethnographic, historical or fairy tale.
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| "Autumn Matryoshka Doll with a Cat" - by Lubov Fetisova |
Matryoshka, generally recognized at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900, became more and more popular, and in 1910 a crafts workshop named Amateur Artist was set up in Sergiev Posad. It was always interesting and even instructive, because by gathering a collection get enough information about the history of Russian national costume, Russia epos, and even Russian literature. The variety of nesting dolls was achieved by the number of pieces mainly ranging from 3 to 12. There exist "supermatryoshkas" having 48 or 60 pieces but these are unique.
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