From Russia With Love

Seen throughout Alaska, the matryoshka nesting dolls are as poignantly meaningful as they are increasingly adorable.

A MATRYOSHKA DOLL IS AN INSTANTLY RECOGNIZABLE SYMBOL OF RUSSIA.

It can take on many forms, but is always a series of wooden dolls of decreasing sizes that fit one inside the other, typically painted to represent either traditional Russian folklife or more topical or satirical themes.

It has been speculated that the matryoshka dolls are inspired by artifacts from East Asian culture such as the Japanese Honshu dolls, which sometimes take the form of round hollow dolls depicting Buddhist monks, but are sometimes nesting dolls that portray the Seven Lucky Gods of Japanese belief. However, Russian master craftsmen were already creating hollow wooden Easter eggs long before the nesting dolls became popular, so they may have developed independently in Russia.

The first recorded matryoshka doll set was carved in 1890 by wood craftsman Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by folk crafts painter Sergey Malyutin, who also painted the dolls. They were created at the Children’s Education Workshop in Abramtsevo, which was founded to make and sell children’s toys by Anatoly Mamontov, the brother of Russian industrialist and patron of the arts Savva Mamontov.

Alaska and Russia share a border; at their closest point in the Bering Strait, they are less than three miles apart. There are active Russian Orthodox churches in around 80 Alaska communities, many of which still use the old Russian Orthodox calendar and celebrate Christmas on what is January 7 on the Western calendar. These Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” often speak an archaic form of Russian called Old Church Slavonic, which dates back to before the American purchase of Alaska in 1867, and wear traditional Russian clothes that they make themselves, such as the sarafan, a long shapeless traditional dress famously worn by the matryoshka. This archetypal first set of matryoshka consisted of eight nested dolls. The largest outermost doll depicted a Russian peasant girl wearing a sarafan and carrying a red-combed rooster. The next five dolls portrayed similar Russian girls in traditional dress, followed by a doll depicting a Russian boy, and then lastly a baby carved from a solid piece of wood.

The dolls were presented at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, where they won a bronze medal; they went on to become popular gifts both within Russia and globally following this publicity, exported in large quantities around the world. The Children’s Education Workshop closed around the turn of the century, but the manufacture relocated to other cities in Russia such as Sergiyev Posad, which had been known as a toy-making center since the 14th century.

The diffusion of the tradition into other towns led to the development of unique local styles that emphasized different design elements. The matryoshka style of Sergiyev Posad typically portrayed scenes of country life inspired by the town itself, and its colorful marketplace teeming with merchants, monks, and pilgrims. Themes of nature and working the land were prevalent, and the dolls would be painted carrying baskets of fruit or bread, bunches of

This archetypal first set of matryoshka consisted of eight nested dolls. They were presented at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, where they won a bronze medal.

flowers, or scythes and other farming tools. Seasonal designs were also popular, with the dolls painted to depict festivals such as Easter and Christmas. The matryoshka crafted in the city of Nizhny Novgorod emphasized the decorative aprons worn by the dolls, with much detail going into the elaborate apron patterns that might depict famous Russian architectural monuments or historic scenes.

The dolls are most commonly made from linden or birch wood, although lime, alder, and aspen are also used as materials. It’s a popular misconception that the dolls are carved out of a single piece of wood, but this is incorrect. In reality the dolls are created from several pieces of wood using a lathe and four

heavy, two-foot-long tools with different chiseled heads. The smallest doll is lathed first out of a single piece of wood, and then the successive outer layers are created piece by piece. No precise measurements are used and the whole process relies on the craftperson’s skill and intuition. After the dolls have been formed from the wood, they are covered in a special glue that fills in any cracks and reduces the roughness of the wood texture, before being painted over with the final decorative design.

The first matryoshka world record was broken in 1913 when a factory created a set of 48 dolls painted in the traditional colors of red and yellow. This was the largest number of nested dolls that had ever been made, but the record was broken again in 1970 by Russian masters who unveiled a set of 72 nested matryoshka at an exhibition in Japan. The record for the largest size matryoshka was broken in 2003 with a 51-piece set of dolls painted by Russian craft painter Youlia Bereznitskaia. The tallest doll in this set measured 21 inches in height, ht, while the smallest doll measured only 0.12 of an inch.

As the 20th century progressed, matryoshka dolls were created with an abundance of different nt styles and themes, such as fairy-tale characters, animals, mals, historical figures, athletes, astronauts, musicians, ans, movie stars, and more. In the late ’80s and early arly ’90s, during the political and social process cess of Perestroika and Glasnost, where the former

Soviet Union was reformed and restructured, ctured, craftspeople were permitted more open forms of expression. Nested dolls depicting picting caricatures of political figures, often painted in a grotesque style, rose in popularity, where they had once been a risky subject matter tter for craftspeople.

One of the most popular styles s of matryoshka during this period became ame known as “Gorbys,” which depicted ted then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the largest outer figure and earlier leaders s of Russia as the inner dolls. Sometimes, the dolls took on a satirical quality and were ere frequently created to comment upon the political upheavals of the age, in a way that hat would not have been permitted in more authoritarian times.

Given all the historical and cultural ltural connections between Russia and Alaska, aska, it is no surprise that matryoshka can also be found throughout the state in a variety ariety of themes that reflect the landscape and culture of Alaska. Matryoshka in the style of Inuit Eskimos are a popular form of the doll, as well as nested dolls inspired by the indigenous wildlife of the region, such as puffins, brown bears, polar bears, and dolphins.

The name matryoshka means “little matron” and is a diminutive form of the Russian female first name “Matryona” or “Matryosha.” In their classical form depicting Russian peasant women, the dolls symbolize the feminine side of Russian culture. Matryoshka are strongly associated with motherhood, family and fertility, and represent a chain of mothers each carrying the next generation as a child within their womb.

The matryoshka dolls are sometimes mistakenly called “babushka” in the west, which means “grandmother” or “old woman.”” This is incorrect, however, as the cultural meaning of the dolls is closely tied to the fertility and abundance of a child-bearing mother, rather than a grandmother who is no longer a fertile source of new ne life. However, it is possible that the name Babushka is a reference re to the distinctive Russian peasant headscarf that the th dolls are often painted wearing, which is also popularly kno known as a babushka.

The concept o of matryoshka lends its name to a design parad paradigm known as the “Matryoshka Principle” or “Nested Doll Principle,” which models ma pattern of object-with insimilarsimilar-object found within nature as well as in human-created systems and other c crafted objects. In this way, forms found in i nature such as the layering of an onion a are reflected in creations such as the Matroska Mat media container format or the Rus Russian Doll model of multi-walled carbon nanotubes.

Th The Netflix series Russian Doll also plays on the symbolism. Its protagonist i say young woman who gets caught in a mys mysterious time loop where she replays the same day over and over, dying at the e end of each night and then waking up a again at the beginning of the same mor morning as if nothing had happened. Each time she dies and replays the same event events, she is changed in some way as a result of the previous experience and the way in which she died, as if her armoring or the outer shell of her character were being peeled away layer by layer to reveal more o of her essential nature.

The smallest doll is lathed first out of a single piece of wood, and then the successive outer layers are created piece by piece. No precise measurements are used and the whole process relies on the craftperson’s skill and intuition.