In 1900, M.A. Mamontova, the wife of Savva Mamontov, presented the dolls at the World Exhibition in Paris and the toy earned a bronze medal. Soon, many other places in Russia started making matryoshki of assorted styles.

Matryoshkas are also passed down metaphorically, as a design paradigm, popular as the "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle". It denotes a recognizable relationship of "similar object-within-similar object" that appears in the arrangement of alive with other natural and man-made objects. Examples include the Matryoshka brain and the Matroska nonevent container format.