My Antonia is steeped in tragedy as it relates to immigrants living in the Nebraskan plains. Around each corner readers are greeted with death and trial. We see this particularly in chapter eight when Jim tells the story of Peter and Pavel. Outside of the satisfaction that comes with the drama and mystery of the tale told from some dying and strange foreigner, there is something deeper that resides within the retelling. Their story of life in Russia, the tragedy of a friend’s wedding night, and their escape to America exemplifies the thematic approach Cather takes as she explores such topics as immigration, foreignness/otherness, and the visage of America.
Willa Cather in Nebraska via The New Yorker
Earlier on in the novel, at the beginning of Chapter five Jim says, “Russia seemed to me more remote than any other country– father away than China, almost as far as the North Pole,” (page 19 in the dover edition). His view of the Russians seems to be furthered by this statement in the way in which he tells their story as a folk tale. He feels for days after to be on a high on the knowledge of such a tale and the secrecy of sharing it with Antonia. He plays into the “otherness” further by not just calling them Peter and Pavel but calling them Russian Peter and Pavel: a way of distancing them from the America he knows, almost as if he is creating in his mind a separate America exclusively for immigrants.
From Jim’s side of the retelling there is the way he Americanizes it saying “I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia,” (page 32). This is a tone taken over and over again by Jim and his grandparents as they interact with the immigrant neighbors from the way they barter with them to the way they view their way of life altogether, in the way they chide the Shimerdas and patronize them for the things they do differently. Moreover there is an absence of emotion in the telling of the story. Instead, there is just the sparse recounting of events. “He called to the groom that they must lighten — and pointed to the bride. The young man curse him and held her tighter…Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him,” (page 31). This is completely devoid of sympathy and seeks to serve, at least to me, as a way to dehumanize immigrants further.
However when you look at the plot and context of the the story of Peter and Pavel, it’s easy to see how centrifugal the tale is to a lot of the themes of the novel. The stereotypical immigrant’s plight is evoked in the fleeing of the Russians from their home because of disgrace and criminal behavior. And while yes, they did want a better life, the way in which the story of their vagrant arrival in America is from something dark and negative seems to suggest that this is the story of immigration Jim has been waiting for, the story he believes to be at the crux of all immigrants. and ultimately, there is the will to survive that is integral to Peter and Pavel. This is what pulls them from strange village to strange village, to further still, to big American city to big American city and finally, to the plains.
As so many of the set-piece stories, one puzzles over what the author intends here. In some ways, I read the Peter and Pavel story as a way for Jim to cement the bond he feels with Antonia. It becomes, selfishly, their story: a dark secret that they can share, that makes their bond feel both stronger and more alive given the horrors of the story. I also read the story as an allegory for immigration in general: the one who leaves must always feel that she or he is leaving the rest of their people to the wolves–to the poverty, or political instability, or lack of opportunity, or famine. And yet, when they arrive in the “New World,” they can never discard that past. It marks them–with sickness, in this case, as a physical emblem of a corroding memory. The question of whether things are better for these immigrants makes us re-think the whole frontier enterprise: millions of individuals went back to Europe after immigrating. It wasn’t always a promised land. But leaving made one feel, as in the Peter and Pavel story, that they made a choice that could not be undone.
As for Jim’s final reckoning of this scene, I think you’re right that he not only selfishly hoards the story with Antonia, but rewrites it in his own dreams as a sort of wish fulfillment. In another sense, though, he is building a bridge between a very foreign experience and his own. It highlights Jim’s own radical sense of displacement, especially at the beginning of the novel where, he writes, he felt “blotted out.”