Warrior Knights Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926)

Description of Victor Vasnetsov’s painting "The Three Bogatyrs"

On this painting,-the real title of which is just as simply The Bogatyrs! - Vasnetsov worked for a particularly long time. This is understandable. The artist needed to depict three completely different types of Russian knights, and the three such different characters needed carefully drawn, but also different armaments.

For example, in the hand of Muromets we see a mace, or a fighting (on an iron or iron-plated handle) pole, and of such dimensions. - and, consequently, and weight, - that the slender Alyosha Popovich could hardly hold, let alone wield it deftly in battle.

Riding heroes were equipped in a standard way: a sword, a spear, a shield, something for the "soul", according to the nature of the warrior - either a club or several darts, but in Vaznetsov’s "Bogatyrs" this set of weapons is distributed by the artist himself. Dobrynya and Popovich were stripped of their lances, and Alyosha has a shield behind his back, or a second thula (a shielded quiver) with arrows. In the latter case, most of the folk anecdotes about this masterpiece of painting are quite justified. But that’s what a masterpiece - to get and new life in folk art.

But Vasnetsov prevailed over critics (both contemporary and contemporary to him) in another matter - about the age of Dobrynya: the artist was reproached that he was not young. But the painting is accurate: even according to the byliny, Dobrynya was not too young, and the real Dobrynja Nikitich of the chronicles staged a bloody coup in favor of the future Holy Prince Vladimir in his more than mature age. And with amazing skill the horses created on the canvas are beautiful and match the armament and even the characters of the heroes.

But apart from such different figures and faces of the knights themselves that "speak" to the audience, the landscape behind them also plays a huge role in the painting. Painted in detail overgrown wooded hills in the background, still Russian, if we judge by the spruce trees, and grassy - in the foreground. This is, apparently, the Wild Steppe, where the bogatyrs carried out their patrol. But where Russian knights stepped, there is their native land, look closely - young spruce shoots are already turning green next to the horses’ hooves.

There was even a version that the bogatyrs were the embodiment of three different but fraternal peoples: the Russian (Ilya), Ukrainian (Dobrynya) and Belarusian (Alyosha Popovich). But let’s leave this version of Soviet art critics for friendlier times. Vasnetsov’s masterpiece is magnificent and without the "nationalist", as we would now respond to this assumption, subtext. Ilya Ostroukhov