concept
The Kukuevka Disaster
Kukuevka catastrophe
also: кукуевская катастрофа, Kukuevo disaster
A notorious 1882 railway catastrophe near the Kukuevka embankment on the Moscow-Kursk line, where a washed-out roadbed caused a passenger train to derail with heavy loss of life; invoked here as shorthand for sudden, arbitrary calamity in a passenger's rebuttal that happiness is really a matter of chance.
Reading notes
- The Lucky One §45 a Kukuevka-style disaster
The Kukuevka railway disaster of June 1882, in which a washed-out embankment on the Moscow-Kursk line caused a passenger train to derail with dozens of deaths, was still fresh public memory in 1886 and stood as Russia's byword for sudden, arbitrary catastrophe -- the skeptical passenger cites it to puncture Ivan Alekseyevich's claim that happiness is simply a matter of will.