“Matryoshka” are Russian wooden dolls with smaller dolls stacked within the bigger ones.
In provincial Russia before the revolution the name Matryona or Matriyosha was a very popular female name. It was derived from the Latin root ‘mater’ which means ‘mother’. Subsequently, it became a symbolic name and was used specially to describe brightly painted wooden dolls made in such a way that they could be taken apart to reveal smaller dolls fitting inside one another.
Even now nesting doll is considered to be a symbol of motherhood and fertility. A mother doll with numerous dolls-children perfectly expresses the oldest symbol of human culture.
The first Russian nesting doll turned by Vassily Zviozdochkin and painted by Sergey Maliutin contaned 8 pieces: a girl with a black rooster was followed by a boy and then by a girl again and so on. All figurines were different from each other, the last one was a figurine of a baby wrapped in diaper.
Confusion About the Name
One of the most widely spread errors in this area is the usage of the word “babushka” to designate a nesting doll. Linguistically this word is linked to the proper name (“matryoshka”) by sound-proximity of the distortion “matryushka” to the word “babushka”. This misleading link is further strengthened by the meaning of the word “babushka”. In Russian language the word means “grandmother” and many, by association, believe that “babushka” stands for a “little grandmother doll”, which is not so. A RussianLegacy.com Internet survey has shown that out of 10,000 people who took part in the statistics experiment most (51%) call “matryoshka” dolls “nesting dolls”, 10.5% – “babushka” or “babushka dolls”, 9.5% – “matrioshka”, 17% – “babooshka”, “matroshka”, “matreshka”, “matryushka”, “stacking doll” or “stackable doll”, and only 12% know the doll by its proper name – “matryoshka”.
Source :
1. Russion Legacy.com
2. http://jazmine.wordpress.com/2003/12/
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