WILLA CATHER

Pavelka Farmstead
Red Cloud, Nebraska

By Christine Pivovar

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) contains the first written use of the word “kolaches” in English, according to the OED. It comes in at the end of the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits his childhood friend Ántonia at her “wide farm-house, with a red barn and an ash grove,” and meets her brood of boisterous children. The sweet, fruit-filled Czech pastries they serve him are still commonplace in bakeries throughout Nebraska today, but I’d never expected to find such a small, prosaic piece of our culture appear in one of the twentieth century’s great American novels. I’ve made kolaches myself, using my grandma’s recipe, which can’t be much different from the one Ántonia’s daughters used. Reading that scene, I had a powerful sense of seeing myself in a novel in a different way than I ever had before. Ántonia could have been my own great-grandmother.

Part of why I could picture that scene so vividly is because I have been to the “wide farm-house” Cather describes. A few miles north of Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, it was the home of her friend Annie Pavelka, who became the inspiration for the character of Ántonia.

Situated near the geographical center of the continental U.S., Red Cloud is a town of brick streets, charming Victorian houses and a wide-open sky. It’s the kind of town where cowboys in full gear stroll into the Subway and two of the town’s three restaurants close for the weekend because of a family wedding. It was founded in 1871, and when the railroad came through in 1879 it brought settlers from all over Europe and the eastern United States. Born in Virginia, Cather moved to Nebraska with her family in 1883. She lived in and around Red Cloud until she left for college in Lincoln. Her memories of this place, in particular the hard but vibrant lives of the pioneer farmers, inspired many of her novels and stories.

Today the Pavelka Farmstead is one of the sites maintained by the Willa Cather Foundation, which provides guided tours of significant places in the author’s life and work. The tour guides can tell you which of Cather’s friends were the models for which characters, what living room a particular scene takes place in. Although their close reading can feel restrictive at times — the books are fiction, after all — there seems to be a kind of pragmatic Nebraskan mindset that looks for these concrete connections. Readers and tourists are used to hunting down literary settings in New York and Boston. Why shouldn’t they also do so in Red Cloud?

This year, the Foundation is restoring the farmhouse: upgrading the foundation, installing electricity, and returning it to its “period of significance.” As works of preservation, the farmhouse restoration and Cather’s books both allow the visitor to step into a world that’s passed out of firsthand memory. Taken together, the physical space can cement the fictional scenes in real experience. When I visited the Pavelka house, it was empty and gutted, but even from the building’s bones, from its sloping yard surrounded by head-high rows of corn, I could picture the lives lived there. I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.

Christine Pivovar is originally from Omaha and today lives near an old pioneer cemetery in Kansas City. She was a Durwood Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she earned her MFA in creative writing and media arts. She has reviewed books for The Millions, The Rumpus and The Kansas City Star, and her fiction has been published in The Southeast Review and Hot Metal Bridge. She also works as a product designer at a software company.

Photo by Barb Kurdna, courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory