The Little Humpbacked Horse

Yershov Pyotr Pavlovich (1815–1869) — a Russian poet and prose writer, a gymnasium teacher. He was born into a civil servant's family in Siberia, in one of the districts of the Tobolsk province. He received his education at the Imperial Saint Petersburg University, in the Faculty of History and Philology. It was there, at the age of 19, that Yershov wrote a poetic fairy tale about a magic horse that spoke in a human voice. This fairy tale was used by Professor of Russian Literature Pyotr Pletnev, who was captivated by the student's talent, to open one of his lectures, pointing 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 Little Humpbacked Horse." Later, it was concluded that Pushkin, who warmly received the poem, only slightly edited it, but after that, Yershov himself changed it four times. "The Little Humpbacked Horse" is written in four-foot iambic meter with a paired rhyme scheme. The folkloric melody, soft and sharp humor, and incredible lightness of the verse continue to make this nearly two-hundred-year-old fairy tale popular today — it was published in 1834; since then, it has been reprinted more than 150 times and translated into 27 languages. It also experienced a period of oblivion — censorship bans pursued it not only during the 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.