Drawing of the famous Russian doll.
The first eight-piece wooden doll was built in the early twentieth century by master Vasilij Petrovič Zvëzdočkin and colored by the illustrator of children's books Sergej Vasil'evič Malyutin, a profound connoisseur of folk art of Russian villages, who represented the doll in the dress, calling her Matrena (from the Latin mater, "mother").
The eight small dolls that made up the first matryoshka represented, in order of size, a mother, a girl, a boy, a girl, etc., up to the last figure, that of a newborn in swaddling clothes.