This is a beautiful matryoshka. The three largest dolls are particularly well executed. I may be missing something, but I do not believe that the sequence of dolls is meant to tell this fable. They seem rather to isolate the characters involved and present them individually. The tragic note of the fable comes in in the axe in the farmer's hands in the second doll. Might the last doll suggest something like the result of the fable: we have a golden egg, and that is all that we have?