English
Russian doll
Noun

Russian doll (plural Russian dolls)

  1. One of a set of hollow nesting dolls, usually wooden and decorated.
    • 2014, Fiona McArthur, Midwife's Mistletoe Baby, Harlequin (ISBN 9781460344323), page 97:
      When she opened it he saw her eyes flash to Simon's, saw the tremulous smile and the stroke of her finger down the painted face of the Russian doll. Those dolls that had other dolls inside.
  2. (figuratively) An issue or situation which repeatedly reveals more levels of complexity.
    • 2012, G. Bernard, Principia Economica, Springer Science & Business Media (ISBN 9789400909359), page 2:
      Any society is thus like a Russian doll, only much more complicated than this toy, whose inclusions are linear, i.e. unidimensional. A society can be imagined as a multidimensional Russian doll.
    • 2014, Julie Armstrong, Experimental Fiction: An Introduction for Readers and Writers, Bloomsbury Publishing (ISBN 9781441107299), page 173:
      The History of Love by Nicole Krauss has been described as a complex Russian-doll structure; a narrative inside another inside another. The form is fragmented. There are multiple voices, multiple narrative strands set out […]
    • 2015, David d'Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage 860–1600, Cambridge University Press (ISBN 9781316299272), page 128:
      Like a Russian doll, a document within the document within the document follows. This last document is in fact the last part of the document discussed in the previous section: the résumé of the evidence and the verdict.
Synonyms
  • (wooden doll) matryoshka, matreshka, matrëshka, matrioshka, matrioshka doll, matryoshka doll, babushka
  • (both senses) nesting doll
Translations

This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003
Offline English dictionary