The Little Humpbacked Horse · 10:46pm Oct 20th, 2020
So, I read a certain blog that, among a great many other things, features a daily piece of fine art every morning. This morning was Viktor Vasnetsov's "Knight at the Crossroads", which, as others have noted, has this interesting characteristic: as the rider looks pensively at a human skull beneath a stele, his horse in turn looks likewise at a horse's skull right beside the human one:
Now, looking around, it turns out that Viktor Vasnetsov was a big deal in Russian neo-romanticism and folklore-themed art, and did a lot of paintings like this, including this one of the great Russian folk character Ivan Tsarevich:
And, by the usual google-assisted wiki-walk, I found myself arriving at this page, detailing one of Ivan Tsarevich's most iconic folk tales, in which he is given a talking 'little humpbacked horse' by a flame-haired spectral white horse. The little humpbacked horse becomes his bosom friend, and they have many clever-jack type adventures. It is all very, very pony, in that rather ruthless, clever-peasant way that Russian folk tales have.
Here's a 1947 animated film of the story, which I'm in the midst of watching:
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The 'little humpbacked horse' reminds me strangely of Derpy Hooves.
That's neat! :D
That's wonderful!
I don’t suppose that blog has a daily piece of art email list because if so I would be very interested in that
The horse is like, "What do you mean, you want to go this way? Didn't you see that skull back there? That's a warning!"
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Doesn't look like it, sorry. At best, you can search for 'Mid-Morning Art Thread', which will pull up a lot of them. In no particular order.
Sorry, I got distracted by a cache of jigsaw puzzle conversions, and just spent almost an hour proving that I suck at jigsaw puzzles.
A lovely little story, and it certainly did smack of pony. Old Ivan was ahead of his time it seems.
What a lucky fellow, Celestia wrecks his crops and then gives him a Derpy.
Neat; thanks for sharing. :)
Ivan Tsarevich (Ivan the Tsar's son) is a different figure from the Ivan the Fool from the "humpback horse" film. AFAIK (there might be more stories recycling the name), Ivan Tsarevich is from "The Frog Princess" story adopted into 1977 animation film Vasilisa Prekrasnaya (googleable on Youtube with en. subs)
That video's been made private. This is probably the same one:
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Yeah, that's it. Sorry, Youtube can be brutal to this sort of upload. Linkrot with a vengeance. Should have updated it, but I was at work when I linked it through. Will fix.
Meh. The original upload's subtitles were less... neon. Oh, well.