Japanese influence on the origin of Matryoshka

[Mitsu Numano]

Dear Matryoshka investigators,
  Just for your information, it is a fairly well-known fact among Japanese
Slavists that there was certain Japanese influence on the origin of the
Russian Matryoshka.
 It was in the middle of the 1890’s that the Russian Matryoshka was first
invented by S. V. Malyutin and V.. Zvyozdochkin at the suggestion of Savva
Mamontov’s wife in their Moscow workshop “Children’s Education”, and it
became popular only after the World Expositon in Paris in 1900 where its
was exhibited.
 It is believed that the design of such Japanese dolls as “kokeshi”
and “dharma” and the handiwork with a nesting system from the resort place
Hakone (“Hakone zaiku”) served as sources of inspiration for inventing the
Russian conterpart.
 One of the possible models, a nest of figures of “fukuruma” (which is
actually “fukurokuju”, one of the Seven Gods of Happiness” worshipped among
common people in Japan), brought to Russian in the middle of the 1890’s, is
now kept in the Artistic Pedagogical Museum of Toys in Sergiev Posad.  (You
can see its photo, for example, in such a popular album as “Matryoshka”
written by L. N. Soloviova (Moscow: Interbook Business, 1997).
 But the Japanese influence ends here, and the further development of the
cultural meaning of Matryoshka and its possible folkloric or even mythic
implication is, of course, Russian alone.

Mitsuyoshi Numano
Dept of Slavic Languages and Literatures
The University of Tpkyo

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