Knight at the Crossroads
Viktor Vasnetsov (1848 to 1926) · 1882
A knight on a white horse has stopped at a grey stone in an empty steppe. His spear droops, his head is bowed, and the horse lowers its neck as if it too were reading the inscription. Around the stone lie bones and a skull, a crow perches on a rock and another circles overhead, and the sky is the colour of dusk. The stone carries the classic warning of Russian folk tales: go straight and you will not live; there is no road for the traveller, the rider or the walker.
Vasnetsov was the first Russian painter to treat folklore with the seriousness usually reserved for history and religion. The composition is deliberately simple and flat, like a page from an illuminated manuscript, with the knight and horse in profile across the picture. Look at the small, precise painting of the chain mail and the shield, and at how the pale light on the horizon is the only warm note in a landscape of stone and moss. The crow on the skull is a piece of pure storytelling, but the painter keeps it small so the mood stays quiet rather than grim.
The picture was painted in eighteen eighty two and bought by the industrialist Savva Mamontov, whose estate at Abramtsevo was the cradle of the Russian revival in art. The first version of eighteen seventy eight showed the knight facing the viewer; Vasnetsov turned him away so that we share his hesitation instead of watching it. The painting became so famous that its inscription is quoted whenever a Russian faces a hard choice, and a version of the composition appears on Vasnetsov's own gravestone.
Did You Know? Vasnetsov reworked the picture in eighteen eighty two so that the knight's face is hidden, and the earlier version with a visible face survives in a smaller canvas.
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