Character guide

Jim Burden

major

Also known as Jim, James Burden, Mrs. James Burden, Jimmy, James O'Neill, young Burden

An orphaned boy who trades Virginia for the vast Nebraska prairie and finds in Ántonia Shimerda the fixed star of his remembered life.

Ántonia Shimerda

major

Also known as Ántonia, Ántonia Shimerda, XII, XII After Ántonia, Poor Ántonia

A Bohemian immigrant girl whose trusting eyes and stubborn patience carry her through prairie hardship, betrayal, and the long work of belonging.

Lena Lingard

major

Also known as Lena, Book III Lena Lingard, Lingard, Miss Lingard

A hired girl with a yielding lip and an easy laugh, who leaves farm drudgery for Lincoln and builds a life on charm, needlework, and self-possession.

Otto Fuchs

supporting

Also known as Otto, Fuchs, Formerly Fuchs, XV Otto Fuchs, XV

A weathered Austrian cowboy with a missing ear and stitched boots, who ropes steers for a boy and prays Psalms beside the hired men.

Grandmother Burden

supporting

Also known as grandmother, II Grandmother

A practical, tender farm wife whose kitchen and prayers hold the Burden household together while she teaches Jim the decencies of prairie life.

Ambrosch Shimerda

supporting

Also known as Ambrosch, Presently Ambrosch

Ántonia's eldest brother, hardened early by debt and dirt, who drives the Shimerda farm with a surly will and little patience for sentiment.

Jake Marpole

supporting

Also known as Jake, Jacob

Jake serves the Burden family through sun and storm, moving them into Black Hawk and treating young Jim like a younger brother. His fatal openness — no match for sharpers — makes him easy prey for Otto's stories of adventure, and despite the family's pleas he boards a westbound train chasing a Colorado mine. His quiet departure marks the end of Jim's farm childhood and the beginning of a world where faithful companions simply vanish.

Anton Jelinek

supporting

Also known as Tony, Anton Jelinek, Jelinek, young Jelinek, Handsome Anton Jelinek, Tony Shimerda

Anton belongs to the web of Bohemian families — Shimerdas, Cuzaks, Jelineks — whose kinship and mutual aid sustain newcomers on the Nebraska divide. His connection to Ántonia's future husband ties him to the question of what her life will become after Jim leaves Black Hawk. For a reader tracing how immigrant communities endure, Anton is a small but telling thread in the fabric of the novel's later years.

Ántonia Cuzak

supporting

Also known as Ántonia Cuzak, Cuzak

Ántonia Cuzak is the woman Jim has carried in memory for twenty years, and the reason he finally breaks his long journey west. Married to a kind but unambitious Bohemian cousin of Anton Jelinek, she has raised ten or eleven children in poverty that others read as failure and she seems to wear as plenty. Her reunion with Jim tests whether his early illusions can survive contact with the real, aging, enduring woman — and whether memory is a truer reality than anything that comes after.

Mrs. Harling

supporting

Mrs. Harling runs a lively household of musical, headstrong children and hires Ántonia as a 'hired girl' — a role that places the immigrant girl at the center of Black Hawk's social world. She restrains Jim's wilder boyhood impulses and later becomes his confidante when he wants to understand Ántonia's broken engagement. Practical, curious, and generous, she is the novel's clearest portrait of how a good woman shapes a town.

Mrs. Shimerda

supporting

Also known as young Shimerda, Old Mrs. Shimerda, old Mrs. Shimerda

Mrs. Shimerda arrives in Nebraska stripped of the status she once held, and her disappointment hardens into constant complaint and grasping demands on neighbors. She scolds even as Ántonia does the family's washing, and her sour presence shadows her daughter's disgrace and homecoming. Her inability to adapt throws Ántonia's resilience into relief — the daughter's generosity measured against the mother's unappeasable grief.

Tiny Soderball

supporting

Also known as Tiny, Miss Tiny

Tiny begins as one of the Scandinavian servant girls in Black Hawk, small and unremarkable, and ends as a wealthy woman in Salt Lake City who audits Lena Lingard's accounts and invests her money. Her frugality is legendary and slightly comic — Lena teases her about growing miserly, and Tiny takes the jab with a grim smile. She matters because she proves that the hired girls Jim grew up with could remake themselves entirely, and because her blunt verdict on Ántonia's hard life is what finally sends Jim back to Nebraska.

Grandfather Burden

supporting

Also known as grandfather

He owns the farm where Jim grows up and serves as the family's moral center, reading Scripture aloud and judging men by their honesty rather than their wealth. His deep attachment to the land he left behind in Virginia gives him a kinship with the displaced Shimerdas that others in Black Hawk lack. When he befriends the Shimerdas and defends them against the town's contempt, he quietly teaches Jim that generosity across lines of class and origin is the prairie's real measure of character.

Peter Krajiek

supporting

Also known as Krajiek, Peter, Rooshian Peter, poor Russian Peter

Krajiek is the Shimerdas' only countryman in the neighborhood, which makes him both their translator and their exploiter — he sold them a dugout farm for far more than it was worth and pockets the difference. His loneliness is real: he left Russia over a 'great trouble,' and he wistfully tells the Burden children he might have had a daughter of his own. His mixture of hospitality and petty predation shows how isolation on the prairie could make even a kind man dangerous to those more vulnerable than himself.

Mr. Shimerda

supporting

Also known as old Mr. Shimerda, Old Mr. Shimerda, XVI Mr. Shimerda, poor Mr. Shimerda, Mr. ¬ÝShimerda

A former weaver and musician in Bohemia, Mr. Shimerda arrives in Nebraska already broken by the loss of his old world and finds nothing in the new one to replace it. He is tender toward his children and grateful for Jim's friendship, but his wife's hardness and the family's grinding poverty leave him with no place to put his grief. His fate shapes the novel's emotional center, teaching Jim — and the reader — what the prairie costs the people it cannot use.

Pavel

minor

Also known as Presently Pavel

A Russian immigrant who tells a grim story about wolves and dies shortly after arriving.

Mrs. Cutter

minor

Also known as Cutter, Mrs. Cutter⁠—locked

The suspicious wife of Wick Cutter who helps Jim escape a dangerous situation.

Gaston Cleric

supporting

Also known as Cleric, Gaston

Cleric is the first person Jim meets who treats intellectual passion as a serious vocation, and his late-night conversations about poetry and Italy open a world Jim never knew existed. He is a man of squandered gifts — Jim suspects his bursts of imaginative talk may have cost him the poetry he might have written — and this quiet tragedy gives him a melancholy that draws Jim in. He matters because he represents the road Jim might take away from Black Hawk, and the tension between that road and the pull of Jim's own past is the novel's central question.

Yulka

minor

Also known as Yulka (Julka)

Ántonia's younger sister who helps with the family and later marries.

Wick Cutter

supporting

Also known as Cutter, XI, XI Wick Cutter

Cutter is the town's most respectable scoundrel: he quotes Poor Richard to boys, contributes to churches 'for sentiment's sake,' and keeps a wife he fights with while carrying on with Swedish servant girls. He fleeced Russian Peter, and his interest in hiring Ántonia is clearly not about housework — Mrs. Harling's warning that Ántonia would have 'a fling she won't get up from' is the novel's bluntest statement of what he is. He embodies the exploitative side of Black Hawk's economy, the danger that waits for immigrant girls who have no family to protect them.

Frances Harling

supporting

Also known as Frances, Frances Harling, Miss Frances

Frances runs the Harling household's affairs alongside her father, walking home with him to discuss grain-cars and cattle 'like two men,' and she is the one who helps rescue farmers from Wick Cutter's clutches. Her interest in the people around her is more than commercial — she carries them in her mind as if they were characters in a book, and she goes out of her way to visit the isolated and the old. She is the one who first recognizes Ántonia's worth and brings her into the Harling household, making her the bridge between the immigrant world and Black Hawk's respectable society.

The Shimerdas

supporting

Also known as Shimerdas

The Shimerdas are a displaced family whose pride, poverty, and stubborn endurance set them apart on the prairie. Mr. Shimerda's homesickness and Mrs. Shimerda's grasping practicality pull the household in different directions, while Ántonia's vitality holds it together. Their struggle to survive the first hard winters makes them the emotional anchor of the novel's early arc, and their fortunes shadow Ántonia's growth into adulthood.

Mr. Harling

minor

The stern but fair father of the Harling family who runs a grain business.

Russian Peter

minor

Also known as Peter

A Russian immigrant who lives with Pavel and later disappears after Pavel's death.

Ordinsky

minor

Also known as Mr. Ordinsky

A temperamental Russian violinist who lives in the same boarding house as Jim in Lincoln.

Nina Harling

minor

Also known as Nina, Nina Harling, Little Nina, little Nina

The youngest Harling daughter, a playful and affectionate child.

Larry Donovan

minor

Also known as Donovan, Larry

A charming but unreliable train conductor who courts and abandons Tiny Soderball.

Charley Harling

minor

Also known as Charley, Charley Harling

The eldest Harling son who goes to college and becomes a successful businessman.

Anna Hansen

minor

Also known as Anna, Norwegian Anna, Anna Hansen

A Norwegian hired girl who works for the Harlings and later marries.

Widow Steavens

minor

Also known as The Widow Steavens

A neighbor who tells Jim about Ántonia's life after he leaves Black Hawk.

Crazy Mary

minor

Also known as Mary

A mentally unstable woman who lives near Black Hawk and is known for her outbursts.

James Quayle Burden

minor

Also known as Jim Burden, Jim, young Burden

The full name of the narrator, Jim Burden, as an adult reflecting on his past.

d'Arnault

minor

Also known as D'Arnault, Blind d'Arnault

A blind pianist who performs at a dance in Black Hawk and impresses the crowd.

Johnnie Gardener

minor

Also known as Johnnie, Johnnie Gardener

A local man who runs the hotel in Black Hawk and is friendly with the hired girls.

Samson

minor

Also known as blind Samson

A blind horse owned by the Shimerdas that Ántonia cares for tenderly.

Miss Nellie d'Arnault

minor

Also known as Lena, Miss Nellie d'Arnault, Miss Nellie

A young woman who plays piano at the dances in Black Hawk.

Leo

minor

Also known as Master Leo

One of Ántonia and Cuzak's lively sons in the later part of the book.

Ole Benson

minor

Also known as Ole, Poor Ole

A Norwegian farmhand who is infatuated with Lena Lingard and later drowns.

Mr. Cutter

minor

Also known as Cutter

Another name for Wick Cutter, the predatory moneylender.

Norwegian Anna

minor

Also known as Anna, Norwegian

A hired girl from Norway who works for the Harlings and is known for her strength.

Chris Lingard

minor

Also known as Chris

Lena's younger brother who works on the family farm and later moves away.

Rudolph

minor

One of Ántonia and Cuzak's sons who helps on the farm.

Martha

minor

A hired girl who works for the Burdens and helps with household chores.

Mrs. Gardener

minor

The wife of Johnnie Gardener who runs the hotel in Black Hawk.

Marek

minor

Also known as poor Marek, Poor Marek

A mentally disabled Bohemian man who lives with the Shimerdas and is harmless.

Sylvester Lovett

minor

Also known as Sylvester, young Lovett

A young man from Black Hawk who is infatuated with Lena Lingard.

Genevieve Whitney

minor

A wealthy young woman Jim meets at a party in Lincoln who is sophisticated and aloof.

Mr. Burden

minor

Jim's grandfather, also referred to as Grandfather Burden.

The Harlings

minor

The family for whom Ántonia works as a hired girl in Black Hawk.

Mrs. Steavens

minor

Also known as Steavens

A neighbor who provides news about Ántonia to Jim after his return.

Sally

minor

A hired girl who works in Black Hawk and is friends with Ántonia and Lena.

Mary Dusak

minor

Also known as Mary, Molly

A Bohemian woman who marries and lives near the Shimerdas.

Mrs. Thomas

minor

A woman who runs a boarding house in Black Hawk where some hired girls live.

Annie Iverson

minor

Also known as Nina

A Swedish hired girl who works in Black Hawk and is known for her beauty.

Jan Bouska

minor

Also known as Jan

A Bohemian immigrant who works as a farmhand and is friends with the Shimerdas.

Nick Svendsen

minor

Also known as Nick

A Norwegian farmhand who works in the area and is known for his strength.

Mrs. Vanni

minor

An Italian woman who runs a dancing pavilion in Black Hawk.

The Cutters

minor

Also known as Mrs. Cutters

The married couple Wick and Mrs. Cutter, known for their troubled relationship.

The Russians

minor

Also known as Russians

Pavel and Peter, the two Russian immigrants who live near the Shimerdas.

Marguerite Gauthier

minor

Also known as Marguerite

A character from a play that Jim and Lena attend in Lincoln.

Young Harry Paine

minor

A young man from Black Hawk who is involved in a scandal with a hired girl.

Selma Kronn

minor

Also known as Selma

A Swedish girl who works as a hired girl and is friends with Tiny Soderball.

Brother William

minor

Also known as brother William

A monk or religious figure mentioned briefly in the narrative.

Mr. Bushy

minor

A man who works at the hotel in Black Hawk and is known for his gossip.

Anson Kirkpatrick

minor

Also known as Kirkpatrick

A lawyer in Black Hawk who is involved in local affairs.

Ole Iverson

minor

Also known as Ole

A Norwegian farmhand who works in the area and is known for his strength.

The Vannis

minor

Also known as Vannis

An Italian family who run a dancing pavilion in Black Hawk.

Prince

minor

A horse owned by the Burden family that Jim rides.

Virgil

minor

Also known as Virgil To Carrie

The Roman poet whose works Jim studies with Gaston Cleric.

Mary Svoboda

minor

Also known as Mary

A Bohemian woman who lives near the Shimerdas and is friends with the family.

Armand

minor

A character from a play that Jim and Lena attend in Lincoln.

The young Cuzaks

minor

Also known as Cuzaks

Ántonia and her husband's children who appear in the final book.

Emmaline

minor

A hired girl who works for the Burdens and helps with household chores.

Dude

minor

A horse owned by the Burden family that Jim rides.

Josiah

minor

A man mentioned briefly in the narrative as a neighbor or acquaintance.

Willy O'Reilly

minor

Also known as O'Reilly

A young man from Black Hawk who is known for his mischievous behavior.

Mr. Paine

minor

The father of Young Harry Paine, a respected man in Black Hawk.

Nanine

minor

A French maid who works for Mrs. Vanni at the dancing pavilion.