I have just bought a beautiful set of hand-painted Matrushka dolls here in eastern Russia. Does anyone out there know what the story depicted on the dolls is? There are a number of varients, but I would like to know the original folk tale. I have tried searching the net, but have had no success.
Thanks!
Some more details are required. There are an awful lot of Matriushka patterns. Many of them are the same pattern for the whole set. One modern matriushka for sale in Moscow has all the different women in Bill Clinton’s life. One of the historical uses of the dolls was to tell a child a bedtime story. As each doll is opened and another doll is pulled out, the new picture on the next doll serves as an illustration of the next part of the story. I have a delightful one, obviously for a little boy’s bedtime story, that has illustrations of an heroic Russian in armour, travelling and fighting the mongol hordes. He shoots mongols out of trees with his arrows and in one picture even holds up the head of a giant mongol he has chopped up. It’s possible you may be able to get an actual complete folk story that matches your pictures but I suspect the pictured stroy lines are often deliberately vague to allow the bedtime-story-teller to vary the story.