Knight at the Crossroads

Description of Victor Vasnetsov’s painting "Bogatyr" (The Knight at the Crossroads)

For some reason Vasnetsov’s painting "Bogatyr" or "The Knight at the Crossroads" always evokes associations not with Ilya Muromets, but with Svyatogor, looking for where he could apply his power. Perhaps because we all know too well Vasnetsovskogo Ilya Muromets "in person" by the painting "Three Bogatyrs.

However, it is not Svyatogor, and none of the other well-known epic heroes. In addition, the face of a knight we can not see. The picture began with a sketch from 1870 - "Knight on a horse and in chain armor", it is known that in an earlier stage of work Vasnetsov had his hero facing the viewer. But then, apparently, the content of the inscription on the stone "in an open field" became more important to the artist (again, in the early versions of the painting, in the sketches, the road WAS, but in the final version of the artist removed it.

Perhaps to emphasize the hopelessness of the knight’s way: there is only one of the three "traditional" signatures on the stone - "if you go straight, you’ll never be alive! Fragments of skeletons, skulls scattered in the grass near the stone, assert this impression. And if one arrives at the gloomy pre-dawn sky, crows over the field, the dramatic sensations increase. So it is quite possible that Vasnetsov painted Svyatogor, whose journey ended tragically.

Interestingly, although Vasnetsov worked on the picture almost fifteen years (of course, working in parallel on other paintings), everyone who has seen the painting in the Tretyakov Gallery, notes - "and the spear is not a knight, infantry! However, this can also be seen on the high-quality reproduction: the lance has an "undercurrent", and its second end is also forged, which makes it easier for a soldier to thrust it into the ground while repulsing an attack by mounted knights. For a horseman such a trimming of the lower part of the staff is not only inconvenient but also can cause damage! So this work by Vasnetsov, in its own way, is unique not only because of its uncharacteristic gloominess and even despair, but also because of this "lance of a foot soldier in the hands of a knight on horseback".

Is this a rare mistake of genius or is Vasnetsov hinting that the Russian knight, even if he loses his horse (though it was this inscription he removed from the stone), is ready to fight anyone on foot? After all, in all the other - and there are about a hundred of them! - Vasnetsov’s paintings, sketches, and sketches of equestrian knights and heroes, their lances are in order, such as, for example, in the 1914 painting The Bogatyr Riding or the magnificent lance of Ilya Muromets on the famed painting Three Bogatyrs.