Viktor Vasnetsov is a singer of Slavic folklore and epic tales. Few people know that he began his artistic career as a realist painter. The painting 'The Knight at the Crossroads' became one of the artist's first canvases painted in the new-for-him genre of historical epic. Not all contemporaries and colleagues understood Vasnetsov's artistic searches, but Ivan Kramskoi and Pavel Chistyakov recognized in him a great master of the Russian narrative and supported him in difficult times.
It is known that Vasnetsov began working on the painting 'The Knight at the Crossroads' as early as the first half of the 1870s. He searched for the narrative composition for a long time and painted several versions of the work, one of which is held in the collection of the Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum. The classic version of 'The Knight at the Crossroads' was painted on commission from the patron Savva Mamontov and shown to the public in 1882.
The image of the knight is inspired by the bylinas about Ilya Muromets and the robbers, in which Ilya finds a stone with a prophecy and decides to ride straight into certain death. 'As I ride straight — to life not to be — there is no path for the passerby, nor for the rider, nor for the traveler passing through,' reads the inscription on the stone before which Vasnetsov's knight has stopped in deep thought. At that moment a difficult choice also faced Viktor Vasnetsov himself: he was deciding whether to remain within the popular Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) movement or to follow his own creative path...
Vasnetsov's knight is dressed in heavy Asian armor; behind him are a shield and a quiver of arrows, and in his hand a lowered spear. The horse has bowed its head, and its whole figure seems frozen in indecision. Ravens are depicted in the painting — in Russian and Scandinavian folklore they symbolize wisdom and death. Skulls and bones lie on the ground, and a lifeless bog surrounds the traveler and his horse. Only the first part of the legend is carved into the ancient stone, while the artist deliberately hid the continuation under a layer of moss. In this way Vasnetsov wanted to emphasize the fatality and necessity of the difficult choice that his Knight faced.
'The Knight at the Crossroads' became one of Vasnetsov's most recognizable works, marking the historical genre in which the artist continued to work until the end of his life. Later Vasnetsov created several copies of the 1882 work, but they did not differ in composition or color scheme from the classic 'Mamontov' version. You can see 'The Knight at the Crossroads' in the collection of the Russian Museum, in Hall 28-2, devoted to art of the second half of the 19th century.
