Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov

Pyotr Yershov was born in the village of Bezrukovo, Tobolsk Governorate (currently Ishimsky District, Tyumen Oblast).

From 1831 to 1836, Yershov studied philosophy at Saint Petersburg University, which was where, at the age of 19, he wrote his masterpiece, the fairy-tale poem The Little Humpbacked Horse.

Yershov published many lyrical verses, a drama called Suvorov and a Station Master, and several short stories, but none of these had the same success as The Humpbacked Horse.

Marie Dmitrijevna owned the largest library in Tobolsk, and Yershov soon became close to his teacher's family.

This allowed Marie Dmitrijevna to go to St. Petersburg with the talented Dmitri for the last money left after the glassworks fire and have him enrolled to study at the Main Pedagogical Institute.

In return, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who had already made a living in St. Petersburg after graduation, helped his teacher Yershov with the reprint of The Little Humpbacked Horse after the release of censorship.

In 1862, Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov became the father-in-law of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, when he married Dmitrije's stepdaughter from his first marriage, Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva.

[2][3] The East Slavic Folktale Catalogue classifies the motif of the poem with the eponymous type СУС 531, "Конёк-Горбунок", of [4] The Little Humpbacked Horse helps Ivan the Fool, a peasant's son, to carry out many unreasonable demands of the Tsar.