My Ántonia Read Along: Book I, Chapters 13-19

The famous “suicide grave.” From the National Willa Cather Center.

Download the full reading schedule here.

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross…. [T]he grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it…. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

Willa Cather became a famous American author by championing the frontier and the pioneers who helped write that chapter in our national mythology. But isolation broke many settlers, and heartache and homesickness define the immigrant experience just as much as freedom does. The same is true for any of us who try to rebuild ourselves after a major life transition, no matter how many platitudes others might offer about the opportunities that every crisis contains.

And so the grisly end to Mr. Shimerda’s life feels like more than a dramatic flourish in My Ántonia. It is a brutal and honest truth.

Mr. Shimerda is based on a real person, one Francis Sadilek, who did indeed commit suicide in the manner described. Willa Cather heard Mr. Sadilek’s story as a child, and it imprinted so indelibly on her that she wrote about it more than once. In fact, her first published short story is wholly devoted to this sad tale; “Peter” appeared in The Hesperian in 1892, Cather’s first year at the University of Nebraska.

You can visit Mr. Sadilek’s “suicide grave,” as it is called, while enjoying the country tour offered by volunteers at the National Willa Cather Center. His remains were later moved to the Red Cloud Cemetery, where he now lies beside his wife Anna and their sons Anton and Joseph.¹

It is enriching to trace some of these artifacts, as we did last week in probing possible sources for Pavel’s dying confession.

Jill Swenson

suggested Chekhov’s story “In the Cart” as a possible source for the wolf attack in Chapter 8, which may yield fresh insight into Cather’s sources.

But I have always found a tension between the search for real-life prototypes for Cather’s fiction and the stories themselves. Why does it matter that a real Czech emigrated to Nebraska, found himself drowning in grief, and could not pull himself out of that unhappiness? Francis Sadilek’s story doesn’t fit the American narrative, except as a cautionary tale. Look where loving the arts too much will lead. Only that is not how Cather retells it. Just as Josiah Burden honors his neighbor’s prayers beside the Christmas tree despite their Catholic flavor, so Cather preserves the essential memories of a man who loved the violin and the trombone. To Ántonia, he is simply her “lovely papa.”

Cather, too, struggled with depression.² She was, in many respects, a reluctant modernist. Just as Mr. Shimerda grieved the beauty he had left behind in the Old Country, Cather mourned the shift in American values from community to commercialism. I cannot help but feel that she heard an echo of her own struggle in Mr. Shimerda’s character, and that by forgiving him for loving beautiful things so much, she was also making a case for her own sensibility. 

Mr. Shimerda still lives among us in young people who want more from their future than a paycheck, more from their education than a resume. There are echoes of his spirit in present-day misfits who would rather belong to something larger than themselves than to double down on a personal brand, who agree with Jim, in that famous garden scene: “[T]hat is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

The meaning I take from Mr. Shimerda’s story this time around is not that it’s foolish to love beauty too much. I’ve been to Prague, to Bohemia, and to my ancestral Moravia, and it is not shameful for men to love beauty there. Everyone paints their home in art nouveau pastels. Memorials to great artists like Antonin Dvořák are spectacular, and family graves are like little shrines. This is more than a flourish for tourists — it is a deeply held value, even a source of resilience through generations of oppression and foreign occupation. And the Shimerdas seemed to be doing well enough in Bohemia before they left.

No, Mr. Shimerda’s story shows how dangerous it is to shame a griever for who they authentically are. He simply needed more people to value him for his pleasures as much as for his practicalities. Because the artist’s pleasure — if supported by others — is also a gift, freely given to all.

Now I’d love to hear how Chapters 13-19 speak to you. I offer a few questions to consider below, but please feel free to just share your insights or your perplexities.

Chapter 13

Josiah and Emmaline Burden don’t seem terribly rich by contemporary standards, but they did have the benefit of bringing some inherited wealth from Virginia to Nebraska. The class differences between new immigrants and those with a few generations of citizenship under their belts stands out here. Why do you think Cather wanted to call attention to these tensions between neighbors on the frontier? 

I’m tempted to think of Grandmother Burden’s observation that no one knows what qualities poverty might bring out in them as an empathetic one. But she immediately advises Jim to forget “the Bohemians” by reading her a chapter from The Prince of the House of David. That seems awfully cold to me, but I wonder what effect you think Cather intended to create? How does this allusion to J.H. Ingraham’s 1898 epistolary novel, which dramatizes the life of Jesus, land with you?

From Project Gutenberg

Chapter 14

Cather reconstructs Mr. Shimerda’s suicide in much the same way that Jim relays Pavel’s recollection of the wolf attack. That is, no one witnessed the actual event, and we hear of the aftermath in fragments through Otto and Jake, who rely nearly as much on speculation as they do on observation. And we must remember that Jim is reconstructing the conversation decades later, based on what he overheard — not what was directly told to him. Yet we don’t think to question the story, do we? Why not? 

One of the enduring images of the novel for me has always been the young Jim Burden reasoning out where it might be likely for Mr. Shimerda’s spirit to linger — the place he might have felt most at home — seeking that place out, and honoring the departed man by meditating on all the stories associated with him. One passage stands out: “Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.”

What does that line conjure for you? 

Chapter 15

I’m struck by how much Mr. Shimerda’s death revives people in Jim’s household. Otto and Jake tell stories — everyone talks more than usual — and meals are dispatched with gusto. Then there is this passage, which I love for its sensory detail and for the way smells and sounds evoke mood. Somewhere Ántonia and Julka are mourning, but Jim’s house smells sweetly and is filled with song.

All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if this occupation brought back old times to him.

Are there any images that seem especially evocative to you in this chapter? Any sentences you admire for their craftsmanship?

Chapter 16

The mood shifts dramatically for Mr. Shimerda’s funeral, and once again it’s the sensory details that set the tone. Cather gives us a master class in “show, don’t tell.”

The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine, icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave, it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women.

What effect does the juxtaposition at the end of this chapter have on the meaning of Mr. Shimerda’s story? There is the awkwardness of the open casket, the frightened Yulka, and Josiah and Emmaline Burden’s attempts to smooth everything over, and then there is a break before Jim wraps the chapter with a more distant memory. What is going on here? Why does the voice of experience finish the chapter, rather than the raw voice of the younger Jim?

Chapter 17

What a balm the opening lines of this chapter are after the harrowing episode preceding it. I’m tempted to read the entire first paragraph aloud. It’s easy to gloss over the contrast that Jim draws between Virgina, which functions as a proxy for the domesticated places that most of us inhabit, where landscapers offer a curated version of spring. Wild places offer fewer filters for the seasons — we feel closer to the source. 

Why do you think Cather chooses to break this sentence where she does? “There was only — spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind — rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.”

• Why doesn’t the dash come after “spring itself” (There was only spring itself — the throb of it, the light restlessness…)? 

• Kurt Vonnegut is famous for saying the semicolons serve no stylistic purpose and should always be passed over in favor of periods or commas with coordinating conjunctions. But Cather’s dashes and semicolons are doing some evocative work here. How might you explain her choices at the sentence-level, and the effects that they produce?

Jim recalls Ántonia fawning over him in Chapter 7, after he’d killed the big rattlesnake. But now she has resumed her superior tone. What do you make of their relationship at this juncture? Why are they drifting apart?

Chapter 18

I recognize some of the less savory qualities of the Shimerdas in my grandfather, and in stories I’ve heard about his father, who died before I was born. That is, Ambrosch’s evasiveness about the horse collar he’d borrowed from Jim’s grandfather, and the silliness of Mrs. Shimerda’s attempts to hide the cow she’d still not paid for remind me of my grandfather’s quiet defiance of Fish & Game regulations. There was probably never much harm done in catching a few fish over our limit or our quiet understanding that we could shoot more than one elk if we happened upon a herd and then use another friend’s or family member’s tag to keep our freezers full of meat. But this felt strange to me as a boy — directly at odds with everything else I’d been taught about good character and honesty.

My great-grandfather lost his Nebraska farm in the Great Depression, and my grandfather knew many lean years. There was no shame then in poaching a deer or two to keep your family fed. But some of these attitudes have older roots — in the feudal systems of the Old Country, when hunting on a lord’s estate without permission might carry a penalty of death. Secrecy and quiet disobedience were also survival strategies for Czechs living under Austrian rule. Surely this is what Cather was referring to when she describes Mrs. Shimerda’s gratitude to Josiah Burden for forgiving her debt as “bring[ing] the Old World very close.”

What does this chapter add to your understanding of “the Bohemians”? 

Chapter 19

I’m mindful of a shift in Cather’s pacing as she closes out Book I. One word for this among creative writing teachers is “the accordion theory of time.” Sometimes we draw the accordion out and linger longer in a scene. And sometimes we squeeze the accordion together to hurry the story along. The early chapters feel more languorous, don’t they? Jim resting in his grandmother’s garden, perfectly happy. Frolics with Ántonia across the prairie. It even takes us a few chapters to get through the winter. But then in Chapter 17 it is spring, and in Chapter 19 it is summer. Cather’s accordion squeezes together, stopping for a harvest scene or a thunderstorm, but also hurrying us along. 

Why do you think the pace quickens in these later chapters? Are we meant to feel the changes in Jim and Ántonia as their worlds drift apart, their class and gender identities hardening the older they get? Or…?

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If you’ve read to the end of this post, I’d be grateful for your thoughts on a more ambitious project: reading all 12 of Willa Cather’s novels in a year. I’m still thinking through logistics and pricing, but a lot will depend on how many readers would be willing to commit to the project. If you have been following this series and would be interested in a more ambitious challenge, please let me know in the brief survey below.

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Willa Cather Read Along with Joshua Doležal

Upcoming Reading Schedule

• April 26: Book II, Chapters 1-5

• May 3: Book II, Chapters 6-10

• May 10: Book II, Chapters 11-15

• May 17: Book III (all four chapters)

• May 24: Book IV (all four chapters)

• May 31: Book V (all three chapters)

1. Annie Sadilek Pavelka, the prototype for Ántonia, is buried in Bladen, Nebraska, with the Pavelkas.

2. Mr. Shimerda’s is not the only suicide in Cather’s oeuvre. ”Paul’s Case” is perhaps the most famous among her stories, The Professor’s House very nearly ends with an accident that looks suspiciously like a suicide attempt, and there are others.