The Little Humpbacked Horse
A 1914 edition cover | |
| Author | Pyotr Yershov |
|---|---|
| Original title | Конёк-Горбуно́к |
| Language | Russian (translated in many languages) |
| Genre | literary fairy tale in verse |
Publication date | 1834 (first book print) |
The Little Humpbacked Horse (Russian: Конёк-Горбуно́к, romanized: Konyok-Gorbunok) is a Russian literary fairy tale in verse by Pyotr Yershov written in 1830s and first published in 1834. Its protagonist is Ivan the Fool with his magical helper, little humpback horse.
It has become a Russian literary classic. Until 1917, the tale was reprinted 26 times, in the USSR it went through more than 130 editions.
The tale is a version of the Golden-Maned Steed fairy-tale motif, about a horse with wondrous abilities. The plot of this story uses a combination of several motifs used in a number of folktales, such as Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf (a tale classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 550, "Bird, Horse and Princess") and some others. The East Slavic Folktale Catalogue classifies the motif of the poem with the eponymous type СУС 531, "Конёк-Горбунок", of