The Little Humpbacked Horse

The Little Humpbacked Horse by Pyotr Yershov, a classic 19th-century Russian fairy tale in verse, has always been a challenging text for illustrators. It shifts quickly from humor to fantasy, from everyday scenes to full-scale fairy tale, and not every artist manages to hold all of this together. The 1993 Petrozavodsk edition by Valentina and Sergey Chinenov is often noted as one of the rare successful attempts.

Working together, the Chinenovs create a vivid and lively fairy-tale world filled with distinctive details. They don’t try to overwhelm the text or modernize it. Instead, the book follows Yershov’s rhythm and lets the story unfold naturally.