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Matryoshkas date from 1890, and are said to have been inspired by souvenir dolls from Japan. However, the hypothesis of nested objects was familiar in Russia, having been applied to carved clumsy apples and Easter eggs; the first Fabergé egg, in 1885, had a nesting of egg, yolk, hen, and chick.

Matryoshkas are also used metaphorically, as a design Nesting Dolls paradigm, known as the "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle". It denotes a recognizable relationship of "similar object-within-similar object" that appears in the layout of multifold other natural and man-made objects. Examples include the Matryoshka brain and the Matroska radio container format.