Russian poet, prose writer and playwright Pyotr Yershov was born in 1815 in the village of Bezrukovo, Ishim District, Tobolsk Governorate. His father, Pavel Alexeyevich Yershov, served as a government official. In 1827, Pyotr’s parents sent him and his brother Nicholas to the Tobolsk Gymnasium. In 1830, his father was transferred to work in St. Petersburg, where the brothers entered the Saint Petersburg Imperial University. Pyotr Yershov studied at the Department of History and Philology.

The tale was first publicly read at one of the lectures: his teacher and literary critic Pyotr Pletnev read out an excerpt from it himself. Yershov’s friend and future orientalist Vasily Grigoriev recalled that ‘The Humpbacked Horse, inimitable in its cheerfulness and ease, was written out of boredom during boring lectures’. With Pletnev’s support, the first part of the tale was published in the magazine “The Reader’s Library” in 1834. The same year, in September, the tale was released as a separate edition by Christian Hinze publishing house.

Andrey Yaroslavtsev, a friend of Pyotr Yershov, wrote in his book:

Yershov Museum Complex of Ishim City houses a collection of editions of “The Humpbacked Horse” in different languages: French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Latvian, Hungarian, Armenian. Poet Inna Veksler, who now lives in Israel, donated the Hebrew version of The Little Humpbacked Horse to the museum. Veksler is a laureate of the 6th P.P. Yershov Literary Competition. She was awarded for her collection of poems in Russian “A butterfly without a pilot”. Inna Veksler’s poems were published by the Ishim children’s educational magazine “The Little Humpbacked Horse”.