Neighbour Rosicky

Willa Cather was born on her grandmother’s farm in Virginia’s Back Creek Valley in 1873. Cather was the first-born in a family of seven children. When Cather was nine years old, her family relocated to Nebraska both to avoid the tuberculosis outbreaks in Virginia at the time, and so that her father could access farmland. After a year of unsuccessful farming, Cather’s father once again relocated the family to the small Nebraskan town of Red Cloud. There, Cather’s father left farming and opened a real estate and insurance business. Growing up in Nebraska, which was then considered a frontier state, Cather was exposed to immigrant families of different geographic and cultural backgrounds as well as Native American families. The local community’s diversity would inform her writing later on in life, as would the natural beauty of the rural environment. Cather went on to study at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. She intended to study medical science and become a doctor, but she switched to become an English major, write pieces that were published in local journals, and eventually work as a journalist. In 1896, she accepted a job in journalism in Pittsburgh, and she stayed working in Pennsylvania for several years, until she moved to New York City in 1906 to work as an editor at McClure’s Magazine. Cather’s writing often concerns the recent historical past and pioneering American characters. Her first book of poetry, April Twilights, was published in 1903, and her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905. She is best known for her “Prairie Trilogy” of novels set in the Great Plains: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), and for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours (1923). Cather’s final book of short fiction, Obscure Destinies, was published in 1932 and contained “Neighbour Rosicky,” one of her more famous stories. Cather and the writer and editor Edith Lewis lived together in New York until Cather’s death from breast cancer in 1947, at the age of 73.

Cather wrote “Neighbour Rosicky” during a period of time when income inequality in the United States was becoming unavoidably visible. Though the story was published in the midst of the Great Depression, it was written in 1928, just before the 1929 stock market crash. The story also concerns widening economic disparity between people living in rural America and urban America, and specifically between farmers and businessmen. And it subtly contends with the politics of immigration and an immigrant life, as Anton and Mary Rosicky are an immigrant couple from Bohemia, a region of what is know today as the Czech Republic. Bohemia itself underwent a transformation in 1918—while it had been a region of what was then known as Great Moravia, it became a part of the newly independent and newly formed state Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of World War I. Rosicky, then, is not just an immigrant to America, he is an immigrant with an unstable native land, which has itself undergone significant political change in decades leading up to the events of “Neighbour Rosicky.”

Cather wrote during the Modernist period of American literature, but her literary style differs from her Modernist contemporaries. She chose to work in a realist genre, keeping her prose historically faithful to the time period and place about which was writing, and avoiding more experimental techniques. Cather wrote largely with a sense of place in mind, and she wrote often about characters seeking freedom in the American West and Midwest. In this way, “Neighbour Rosicky” can be likened to other frontier and pioneer texts, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie or Mark Twain’s Roughing It or even Cather’s own famous My Ántonia. “Neighbor Rosicky” was also published in Obscure Destinies, Cather’s trilogy of stories which also included “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Two Friends,” all of which were stories concerning the value of (and beauty to be found in) a modest life.