Why it matters
A knight on horseback stops at a stone at a crossroads, whose inscription warns: 'If you go straight ahead, you will find no life.' Vasnetsov removed the road from his earlier sketches to show there is no way out.
Did you know?
- The first version was shown in 1878; he completed the final one in 1882.
- It was inspired by the Russian epic of Ilya Muromets.
- The critic Vladimir Stasov praised it.
Based on the French Wikipedia article Le Chevalier à la croisée des chemins (CC BY-SA 4.0).
