The composition was premièred in Brno on March 13 in Janáček's presence, although it seems that at the time he was intending it to be part of a larger work.
Janáček revised the work with the addition of a tranquil finale which also reprised part of the introduction, intended to depict the Tsarina singing a lullaby.
A composition of 172 bars, marked simply Presto, also exists in Janáček's hand on the same paper as the manuscript of Pohádka.
The scholar Jaroslav Vogel and others have thus speculated that this movement was intended to be included in the original version of Pohádka, but was removed when the work was revised.
A portion of Pohádka was used in the soundtrack to the 1988 film The Unbearable Lightness of Being and also in The Discovery of Heaven from 2001 (based on the book of the same name by Harry Mulisch).