The Humpbacked Horse: A Tale

Yershov Pyotr Pavlovich 1815–1869 - a Russian poet and prose writer, a gymnasium teacher. He was born in a family of an official in Siberia, in one of the districts of Tobolsk province. He received his education at the Imperial St. Petersburg University, in the faculty of history and philology. It was there, at the age of 19, that Yershov wrote the poetic fairy tale about a magical horse that spoke in a human voice. This fairy tale was the beginning of one of professor of Russian literature Pyotr Pletnev's lectures, who, enchanted by the student's talent, pointed out the blushing author sitting in the audience. For a long time, it was believed that the first four lines were written by Alexander Pushkin, to whom Pletnev, a close friend of the poet, showed The Humpbacked Horse. Later, it was concluded that Pushkin, having warmly received the poem, only made slight edits, but afterward Yershov himself changed it four times. The Humpbacked Horse is written in iambic tetrameter with paired rhyme. The folkloric melody, soft and sharp humor, and the amazing lightness of the verse still make the nearly two-hundred-year-old fairy tale popular - it was published in 1834; since then it has been reprinted more than 150 times and translated into 27 languages. It also went through a period of oblivion - censorship bans pursued it not only during Tsarist Russia but also during the Soviet era. According to the author, this fairy tale is folk, based on the tales of the Baltic Slavs and Scandinavians.