Read More Babushka History

Babushka History. The first Babushka matryoshka Nesting doll was born in 1890 in the workshop “Children’s Education” situated in Abramtsevo estate new Moscow. The owner of Abramtsevo was Sava Mamontov – an industrialist and a patron of the arts.

The end of the 19 century was a time of great economic and cultural development. Mamontov was one of the first who patronized artists who were possessed by the idea of the creation of a newstyle. Many famous artists worked along with folk craftsmen in the workshops of Mamontov.

Once at a traditional Saturday meeting, somebody brought a funny Japanese figurine of a good-nature bold head old man Fukuruma. The doll consisted of some other figurines nestled one another. It had 7 figurines. That was the first known nesting doll. On the other hand, there was a legend that the first doll of such type (nested wooden doll) was brought on the Japanese island Honshu (where Fukuruma was made) by unknown monks.

Really, this type of nesting toy was well known before – crafter’s turned wooden Easter eggs, apples. One of the artists of Mamontov’s artistic surrounding Sergei Maliutin was intrigued by the Fururuma nesting doll and he decided to make something similar but with peculiarity, an own nesting doll.

The doll should have its own spirit and to represent specific cultural and people art traditions. So Sergei Malytunin made a sketch of such a doll and asked to help him to make a wooden form for the nesting doll the crafter by name Vasiliy Zveydochin. Zveydochin turned at his lathe the first wooden nested dolls of soft linden wood.

The principle of making dolls remains unchanged until the present time, keeping all the tricks of turning skill of craftsmen. Usually a turner uses such wooden materials as lime and birch. Timber that is intended for the manufacture of dolls, usually is cut down in early spring, purified from the bark, leaving in some places of the log rings of bark to prevent during drying cracking of the wood.

Prepared in this way the logs are stacked in piles, between them there is a gap for airflow. Usually, timber is kept in the open air for several years to bring it up to a certain condition, avoiding not proper drying. Only an experienced master can determine the readiness of the material. Ready to process the logs are sawn into billets for future dolls. The doll blank overcomes though up to 15 operations in the hands of a turner before becoming a finished doll. Maliutin painted the dolls in accordance with his own design.

The first nesting doll described a peasant family

A mother with her 7 children. The nested doll consisted of 8 pieces. This set and some other one’s old matryoshkas are displayed in Sergiev Posad at the Museum of Toys.

There in the museum, we can see many old nesting dolls like “An old man”, set of 8 pieces of matryoshka, “Getman”, 8 pieces set of the nested doll, matryoshka “The tale about turnip”. Why it is called “Matryoshka” It happened so that the wooden toy was Matryoshka (or matryoshka, if you wish) and there is no information who was the first to call the nesting doll by this name. Definitely the name Matryoshka goes from female name Matriona.

In old among peasants, the name Matriona or Matriosha was a very popular female name. Scholars say this name has a Latin root “mater” and means “Mother”. This name was associated with the image of a mother of a big peasant family who was very healthy and had a portly figure.

Subsequently, it became a symbolic name and was used especially to image brightly painted wooden figurines made in such way that they could take apart to reveal smaller dolls fitting inside one another. but babushka means grandmother so it’s very close in meaning