10 Piece Signed Small Russian Matryoshka Nesting Doll Set. Identical feminine faces, blue body, and red floral pattern in center on each successive piece. Signed on the base of the first doll in Cyrillic script. 

Largest Size: 3 x 3 x 4 in. 

Nesting dolls, also known as stacking dolls, Russian tea dolls, and their original name of matryoshka dolls, are sets of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The name Matryoshka is a diminutive form of Matryosha, in turn a hypocoristic of the Russian female first name Matryona. A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which separates at the middle, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on for an indeterminate number of iterations, sometimes as few as two and in some cases extreme numbers within up to several dozen, depending on the skill and scope of the maker. The first Russian nested doll set was made in 1890 by wood turning craftsman and wood carver Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, a folk crafts painter in Abramtsevo, for a Russian industrialist and patron who had opened the Children’s Education Workshop. Traditionally the outer layer was a woman dressed in a Russian sarafan dress. The figures inside could be of any gender, but the smallest, innermost doll was typically a baby turned from a single piece of wood. Much of the artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be very elaborate. The dolls often follow a theme, which today varies extensively from fairy tale creatures to Soviet leaders to Star Wars characters. The inspiration for matryoshka dolls is not clear, but may have been inspired by a nesting doll imported from Japan, or a unique style of nesting Easter eggs first produced by Russian woodworkers in the mid 19th Century. A set of matryoshka dolls was presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 which earned a bronze medal, and soon after matryoshka dolls and imitations of them were being made in several places in Russia and shipped around the world. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union many matryoshka factories closed, and independent artists began to produce matryoshka dolls in homes and art studios. The standard shape approximates a human silhouette with a flared base on the largest doll for stability. Other shapes include potbelly, cone, bell, egg, bottle, sphere, and cylinder. The size and number of pieces varies widely. The industry standard from the Soviet period, which accounts for approximately 50% of all matryoshka ever produced, is six inches tall and consists of 5 dolls. Other common sets are the 3 piece, the 7 piece, and the 10 piece. Distinctive regional styles developed in different areas of matryoshka manufacture, and pop culture began to play a massive role in designs once the Iron Curtain had come down. Matryoshkas are also used metaphorically as a design paradigm, known as the “matryoshka principle” or “nested doll principle,” denoting a recognizable relationship of objects within similar objects that appears in the design of many other natural and crafted items, and is used interchangeably with the onion metaphor employed by designers in applications such as the layering of clothes or the design of tables, where a smaller table nests within a larger table, and a smaller one within that. The metaphor has also been used in the description of shell companies and similar corporate structures that are used in the context of tax-evasion schemes in low-tax jurisdictions, and to describe satellites and suspected weapons in space, as well as repeating consequences for mutual aggression with a single inevitable conclusion.