"Cliff Notes - My Antonia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

The narrator, Jim Burden, never describes himself. You learn about him instead through what he says and does, and what other people say about him. In the Introduction you meet him first as a successful railroad lawyer. This job allows him to travel often through the land he grew up in and still loves. You also learn that he has always been a romantic, even though he has chosen as his wife a cold woman who leads her own life.

At the beginning of his memoir, Jim is a ten-year-old orphan arriving to live with his grandparents. He is shy yet independent, and enjoys spending time alone. He has strong responses to the land and the people he meets: he feels warmly toward Antonia and her father but is suspicious of her mother and brother. When Antonia tries to give Jim a silver ring in gratitude for her first English lesson, he refuses her gift as "reckless and extravagant." Yet her generous and spontaneous nature fascinates him all his life, though he himself is either unwilling or afraid to become directly involved with her. He generally stands back from life and observes.

Jim is smart. His academic success is partly due to his willingness to deny the emotional side of his nature. A high point of his life occurs when the country girls admire his high school graduation speech. Unlike the other boys his age, his mind is on college, not marriage. Even so, his friendship with the hired girls is very important to him.

After he becomes a lawyer, Jim's knowledge of the prairie helps him achieve success with the railroad. Cosmopolitan as he becomes, he often thinks of Nebraska and his early friends. Over twenty years he gets occasional news of Antonia but fears meeting her as a middle-aged woman. Finally one summer, when he pays her an unexpected visit, Jim begins to break out of his role as observer. He realizes he feels deep emotion for the Cuzaks, as if he has spontaneously become a member of the family.

Is there significance in Jim Burden's name? Has he felt like a burden on his grandparents who adopted him? Is he carrying a burden--perhaps the story of the Nebraska prairie and the pioneer woman who symbolizes it?

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: ANTONIA SHIMERDA CUZAK (TONY)

Cather tells us from the first how to pronounce the name Antonia: An'-ton-ee-ah, with the stress on the first syllable. That European detail finally sets the tone for the story of the immigrants from Bohemia.

In contrast to Jim, physical descriptions of Antonia are plentiful in the novel. Recalling the first time he met the fourteen-year-old girl, Jim writes that her eyes were "like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood," and her brown hair "curly and wild-looking." Her fine tanned skin and cheeks "like... dark red plums" will be noted again and again. Antonia is healthy and happy, at one with herself and with nature.

Antonia is her father's daughter--bright, sensitive, eager, and quick to learn. "Tony," as Jim calls her, is spontaneous and generous, eager to emphasize and admire the best in others. She's sympathetic to all the members of her family, even the difficult ones. You see her motherly softheartedness over the dying insect in the garden, Peter and Pavel's troubles, and her father's homesick hopelessness.

However, like her peasant mother, Antonia is a survivor. After her father's death, she accepts that life is going to be hard. She gives up her hopes of going to school in order to work in the fields. Grandmother Burden later helps her to get a job in town with Mrs. Harling, so she won't "lose all her nice ways and get rough ones." Mrs. Harling becomes her spiritual mother, the woman after whom she will model her own life, family, and well-run home.

Antonia is based on an immigrant woman named Annie Sadilek Pavelka whom Willa Cather knew and admired in Red Cloud. Annie was the hired girl of the Cathers' neighbors. Like her model, Antonia is an independent spirit. As she matures into radiant womanhood she has many admirers but stubbornly falls in love with an unprincipled man she feels sorry for. After he leaves her unwed and pregnant, she overcomes her disillusionment, determined to make a better life.

Though Antonia never appears in Book Ill, Jim and Lena frequently speak of her good-natured devotion to people. When Jim meets her again in Book IV, he realizes that Antonia's unhappy love affair has deepened her strength and understanding. She seems to find comfort in being outdoors alone and in taking loving care of her baby daughter. This picture of her prepares you for finding her twenty years later the mother of many happy and helpful children, the wife of an indulgent husband, and the proud mistress of a productive farm. Knowing her again in mid-life, Jim thinks, "It was no wonder her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." Clearly she is the embodiment of the old pioneer values of family ties, honest work, and love of the land.

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: GRANDMOTHER BURDEN (EMMALINE)

Jim's grandmother cries as she first looks at him sleeping after his journey from Virginia. She misses her son, Jim's recently deceased father. Though somewhat reserved, Grandmother has strong feelings, and becomes a good mother to her grandson.

Grandmother Burden is a tall, dark, weathered woman, with a slightly shrill and anxious voice. She unquestioningly supports her pious husband. Her house and large garden are efficiently organized and pleasant. Born in Virginia, she retains a Southern politeness that will not permit her to speak sharply to Mrs. Shimerda even when provoked.

Mrs. Burden is friendly to all living things, from the badgers that sometimes take a chicken, to the Shimerdas who have untidy and grasping ways. She talks loudly to the foreign Shimerdas as though they were deaf, but takes a particular interest in Antonia.

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: GRANDFATHER BURDEN (JOSIAH)

Jim's grandfather looks like the popular image of an imposing biblical patriarch. His long white beard and bright blue eyes add to his natural dignity. He says very little, and the family learns his thoughts from the prayers he offers aloud. A Baptist, Grandfather reads the Bible daily. While strict in his own religion, he demonstrates tolerance, even acceptance, toward others so long as they believe strongly in their own faith. Grandfather practices what he preaches; he is generous and fair, a leader in the community. He pays Jim's way at college, first in Lincoln and then at Harvard.

The Grandfather lives according to the biblical commandments and expects others to do the same. He applies these ancient laws to a new world in a manner typical of nineteenth century Americans. He has a vision of America's future that he works to make a reality.

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: JAKE MARPOLE

Jake, a young farmhand for the Burdens in Virginia, accompanies the orphaned Jim to Nebraska. There he works for Grandfather Burden and becomes friends with Otto, the other hired man. Jake is--and probably always will be--an overgrown kid, with unruly hair, a gullible nature, and little sense of how to get along in the world. You like him because, despite his often violent temper, he is good to Jim and devoted to the Burdens. After he helps them move into Black Hawk, he follows Otto out West, presumably becoming a drifter.

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: OTTO FUCHS

Otto, Grandfather's hired hand, looks like a Western desperado from a book Jim's been reading. Wiry and brown, he has a long scar on his cheek, only part of his left ear, and a mustache which he twists up at the ends. He wears a cowboy hat and boots and keeps fancy chaps and spurs in a trunk. Originally from Austria, he has worked out West as a cowboy, miner, and stagecoach driver. We feel there is something dark--violence or failure--in his past. He is Mr. Burden's righthand man, a loyal and hard worker.

Although he looks ferocious to Jim at first, he is kind, honest and friendly. He loves to sing and tell stories. With his carpentry skills he makes a sleigh for Jim and a coffin for Mr. Shimerda.

^^^^^^^^^^MY ANTONIA: PETER KRAJIEK