Barbie's great-grandmothers on display in "Yasnaya Polyana"

A unique antique dolls exhibition was opened in the Museum-Estate of Leo Tolstoy in "Yasnaya Polyana".

Items for the exhibition "The Wonderful World of Antique Dolls" were provided by the Moscow Museum of Unique Dolls. The head of the museum, a theater artist and collector, Yulia Vishnevskaya, who founded the museum in 1996, gathered within its walls about six thousand antique dolls, as well as dolls' "household" items. The oldest doll in the collection is made ​​by an unknown master in Germany in the late 17th century, and the oldest exhibit is a fragment of a doll dress, dated from 1650.  The "youngest" doll has recently celebrated its centenary.

"In recent years, collecting dolls has been booming all over the world, and there are many reasons for that," said Larisa Leonidovna Drozdova, a doll collector known both in Russia and abroad. "Dolls are like unique objects of art, specially designed for collecting and studying. They, like a mirror, reflect manners and habits of their era, keeping the unique spirit of antiquity."

The exhibition offers its visitors an opportunity to get acquainted with the works of leading masters of Germany, France, England and Japan. Who knows, maybe that apart from aesthetic pleasure, some of them will set their sights on a new hobby that can radically change their entire life?

Noteworthy, nowadays the uniqueness of dolls is expressed in relatively large amounts of money. Being a famous financier by nature of her core business, Larisa L. Drozdova notes that at world's leading auctions some items may cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.