The popular souvenir from Russia, a lathed wooden doll dressed as a female peasant and containing several smaller versions of herself all the way down to a baby, was invented and designed by the folk craft painter Sergey Malyutin. He was inspired to create the so-called Russian nesting doll in 1896 after receiving a hollow "Daruma" Buddha doll on a journey to Japan with his wife.

"Russians are heavy drinkers." You've heard that before, right? But it's not completely true. According to the World Health Organization, Russia landed at number 16 in a ranking of countries that drink the most alcohol (11.7 liters of pure alcohol per capita). Germany ranked at number five (13.4 liters), while Moldova topped the list. Nearly half of Russians do not drink alcohol at all.

In contrast to France or Italy, Russia is a vast country with diverse culinary influences that lacks a distinct national cuisine. In the past, peasant food in the villages would center around seasonal crops, including the beet used in Borscht, while nobles ate European dishes. Russian cuisine today is a hodgepodge. "Herring under fur coat" (pictured) is derived from the Norwegian "Sildesalat."

Russian culture's calling card came in the form of 18th-century courtly entertainment from France to St. Petersburg's court. French choreographers such as Charles Didelot and later Marius Petipa helped the grand dance art to blossom and founded lasting ballet schools.

Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoi, Ivan Shishkin and other renowned artists made up a highly influential movement of Russian realist painters. Their education at the leading Russian art academies lead to permanent stays in Western Europe. Landscape painter Ivan Shishkin, whose Morning in a Pine Forest (pictured) is considered one of the great Russian realist works, studied in Geneva and Düsseldorf.

Russian filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein (pictured) and later Andrei Tarkovsky are considered radical innovators in film. As the director of the groundbreaking silent film Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein has continued to have a great influence on filmmakers around the world, with the likes of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola paying homage to his masterwork.

There is no Russia without Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And there are no great Russian writers who did not maintain close ties to European culture across the centuries. Pushkin wrote his letters in French; Gogol spent 10 of his 43 years in Italy and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were in intense dialogue with the Western humanist tradition.

Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov or Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame are world opera classics, and 20th-century symphonies are unthinkable without Shostakovich or Prokofiev. Russian music's special national character developed in the mid-19th century with the founding of the New Russian School of composers that included Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, author of operas like The Tsar's Bride (pictured).