NEIGHBOUR ROSICKY
by Willa Cather, 1932

Willa Cather's "Neighbour Rosicky," first published in 1928, was later collected in Obscure Destinies. The story is that rare masterpiece in modern American literature, a celebration of good life and the good person. The key line is the story's last, a reflection of Ed Burleigh: "Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful."

Burleigh is the bachelor doctor in a Nebraska farming community where Anton Rosicky, a Czech immigrant, has preferred to make small profits rather than sacrifice familial and neighborly cohesion. Burleigh's judgment comes after Rosicky's death, as if to affirm the ancient Greek principle that no man should be called happy while he is alive. The depiction of virtue has always been more difficult than the depiction of the mean, the tawdry, the vicious. Using the young doctor as a framing device for her story gave Cather several advantages for creating virtue. Burleigh provides the perspective of someone whose daily affairs keep him in contact with the community. Part of him looks at suffering and death scientifically, and, dedicated to his profession, he emerges as a trustworthy guide. His perspective helps Cather avoid the sentimental. In "Neighbour Rosicky" goodness seems good without being cloying.

Burleigh's status as a bachelor is a significant element in the story, for it not only accents his role as a disinterested surveyor of the community but also heightens the story's concern for the perpetuation of Rosicky's values. There is no suggestion that Burleigh will be able to find a helpmate who could enable him to duplicate the achievement of Anton Rosicky. He seems destined to be an observer, an evaluator, like an author of fiction.

Burleigh's vision alone would not be sufficient to create a convincing representation of the uncommon success of Rosicky's life. Cather also used an omniscient narrator to reveal Rosicky at moments when Burleigh is not present. The narrator takes the reader close to the private Rosicky and enables the reader to witness Rosicky in interaction with his wife and family when no outsiders are present and to share moments when Rosicky is alone. A significant part of "Neighbour Rosicky" portrays Rosicky remembering, and the reader thus has ample opportunity to test Burleigh's judgment of Rosicky.

While creating a picture of an individual—the title reflects this goal—Cather is careful to make the picture comment on the greater American experience. She contrasts Rosicky's life in Nebraska with his European roots—he has lived in London as well as in Czechoslovakia—and with his years in New York City. Written and published during the era of Coolidge prosperity, "Neighbour Rosicky" challenges the assumptions of a galloping materialism and asks what place, if any, the Jeffersonian ideal of the small farmer living in close contact with the land might yet have. Many of Rosicky's neighbors are opting for dreams of great fortunes, moving as rapidly as possible to big machinery and forgetting to ask the most fundamental question: What is the good life? To emphasize the larger implications of the story of Rosicky, Cather recounts a defining day, the Fourth of July, in Rosicky's past. Although uncommon heat had destroyed that summer's crops, Rosicky and his wife had a family picnic to celebrate the fact that they still had their land, their faith, their health, and each other.

Rosicky had taken to Nebraska the best of the Old World. He is a man unafraid of feeling, a trait that Cather emphasizes by calling attention to Rosicky's creative hands—gypsy hands, we are told. A tailor in London and New York, farmer Rosicky still occupies himself usefully with needle and thread; like his wife Mary, he is not victimized by rigid gender roles. His greatest gift is loving people and enjoying their fellowship.

Rosicky had found pleasure in great music in cities, but industrial tensions had gradually made the assets of the cities not worth their price. He increasingly met urban foulness, misery, and brutality, the very things that Thomas Jefferson had found in the industrial cities of Europe and had hoped would not be exported to an America he envisioned as essentially rural. Searching for a better life, Rosicky moved west.

In Nebraska he realized the Jeffersonian ideal. Although his family had never owned land in the Old World, he obtained land in Nebraska, and he took a wife, also Czech. Mary enjoys farm life and is comfortable with herself. The Rosickys are more comfortable with their bodies and their emotions than are their Protestant neighbors. (Cather is careful to keep Rosicky removed from doctrinal religion, however, and aims instead at suggesting his spiritual essence.) Mary is also a good cook, and Cather's story teems with images of food, images enforcing the Rosicky code that good food is symbolic of quality living.

The ultimate test of good living is, inevitably, one's dying. How Rosicky responds to the news that his time is limited provides the structure of Cather's story. Having lived 65 years, Rosicky is not alarmed by Dr. Burleigh's declaration that he has a "bad heart." Without being foolish, he continues to enjoy the things that he has always enjoyed. But he does have unfinished business, which allows Cather to expand her consideration of the American dimensions of her story. In the American melting pot Rosicky's oldest son, Rudolph, has married someone who is not Czech, or even Catholic. Having a difficult time at farming, Rudolph is considering moving to Omaha for his wife Polly's sake. Rosicky does not instruct the young couple, but he does understand the tensions they feel. Through the power of his example and sympathy, he conveys his vision to Polly during his last days and weeks. Before he dies, he is gratified to hear her call him father and to know the secret that she is pregnant. Rosicky's values will outlast him.

At story's end, as Dr. Burleigh surveys the graveyard where Rosicky is buried, Cather reminds her readers of the cities Rosicky has fled. Burleigh thinks of "city cemeteries; acres of shrubbery and heavy stone, so arranged and lonely and unlike anything in the living world. Cities of the dead, indeed; cities of the forgotten, of the 'put away.' But this was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred." In his prairie grave Rosicky is not "put away." For Burleigh and for others he is still neighbor. In Cather's quiet story not only has the American dream had uncommonly satisfying fulfillment, but death also has lost its sting.

—Joseph M. Flora