The Little Humpbacked Horse: A Tale

Yershov Pyotr Pavlovich (1815–1869) - a Russian poet and prose writer, a gymnasium teacher. He was born into a family of a government official in Siberia, in one of the districts of the Tobolsk province. He received his education at... the Imperial Saint Petersburg University, faculty of history and philology. It was there, at the age of 19, that Yershov wrote a poetic fairy tale about a magical horse that spoke in a human voice. This fairy tale was used by Professor of Russian Literature Pyotr Pletnev, who was impressed by the student's talent, to begin one of his lectures, and then pointed to 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 Little Humpbacked Horse. Later it was concluded that Pushkin, having warmly received the poem, only took to slightly editing it, but after that Yershov himself changed it 4 times. The Little Humpbacked Horse is written in four-stressed iambic meter with paired rhymes. The folkloric melody, soft and sharp humor, and the amazing lightness of the verse continue to make the almost two-hundred-year-old fairy tale popular - it was published in 1834; since then it has been republished more than 150 times and translated into 27 languages. It also went through a period of oblivion - censorship bans pursued it during both Tsarist Russia and Soviet times. According to the author, this fairy tale is folk, based on tales of the Baltic Slavs and Scandinavians.