Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
I bought a matryoshka that was made in Belarus. Does that count as genuine?
Why not? The "genuine Russian" matryoshka is less than 150 years old -- invented in 1890 by Sergei Malyutin, a professional Russian artist and architect. And the design is said to have been at least partly inspired by a Japanese "nested" doll that depicted a Buddhist monk with smaller monks inside, although it can be argued that Malyutin's redesign improved on the Japanese concept in some ways.

It's also possible that the story has gotten confused over time and that the Japanese original that inspired Malyutin was not a doll, but a set of nested cups or boxes. Or, it could be that the original Japanese doll was a type called daruma, which has a round shape like a matryoshka, but does not have smaller dolls inside it.

ЗЫ: Almost a century later, in the 1980s...





...the Russians were still ripping off the Japanese))))))