Russian Dolls. The Matryoshka Doll in Russian Culture:
To non-Russians, the matryoshka, or nesting doll, is one of the most quintessential representations of traditional Russian peasant life. It appears to foreign eyes as a relic of quaint serf culture. Surprisingly, however, the matryoshka is barely one hundred years old.
The first matryoshka, created in 1892, very much resembles the matryoshkas found in gift shops worldwide today. It is a small wooden doll, almost perfectly cylindrical, painted to resemble a peasant woman in a traditional sarafan dress holding a rooster. She opens to reveal a smaller doll, which opens in turn to reveal yet another doll, and so on. In total, there are seven dolls in addition to the mother doll; they consist of five girls dressed in similar fashion, a boy doll, and a tiny baby at the center. Each doll wears brightly colored clothing (though now faded with age) and bears a small smile, pink cheeks, blonde hair, and a headscarf (“First”).
This matryoshka was a product of a reflourishing of Russian arts. The late nineteenth century in Russia witnessed a decrease in toy production using Russian materials, so royal figures and other upper-class members of society began encouraging further production via the patronage system (Lodder 399). Princess Maria Tenisheva was a major figure in the Russian production revival, as she set up a system of workshops at her estate Talashkino. From 1900 to 1905, the workshops were more or less a utopia of happily employed peasants (Salmond 11). One such peasant was a man by the name of Sergei Malyutin, who painted the first matryoshka at the behest of patron Savva Mamontov. Mamontov’s brother Anatoly, the owner of a toy shop, had seen similar dolls while on a visit to Japan and became fascinated with the nesting concept. Toymakers in the leading toy centers of Sergiev Posad and Semyonov swiftly began producing matryoshkas (Roosevelt).
The dolls soon became a major export as a Russian souvenir. Non-Russian buyers believed they were authentic handmade folk art, representing an “ancient mother goddess of Siberian peoples” (Hilton 127). Yet although they were in fact mass-produced, this belief was close to the truth — many of the Russian peasant factory workers crafted and painted the matryoshkas (the name itself related to мать, the Russian word for “mother”) as a representation of Mother Russia (Salmond 10). As Joanna Hubbs puts it in Mother Russia, “the Matrioshka (sic) doll … is debased, a souvenir of the motherland sold to tourists … her archaic significance forgotten. And yet … her iconographic presence … express[es] a mythology of maternity” (237). In essence, the matryoshka doll still holds the unique symbolism of Russian patriotic feeling even as it is produced for tourists worldwide.
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