place
Kalanchik
also: Каланчик
A settlement on the road where the father and Anyutka stop at Moiseika's tavern; at the time the railway was under construction there, drawing the itinerant laborers who overhear the father's fatal boast.
Reading notes
- An Incident (A Coachman's Tale) §8 they were building the railway
Railway construction in provincial Russia in the 1870s-80s drew large itinerant labor gangs, often recruited from displaced or landless men with little local accountability; the narrator's description of "riffraff and barefoot rabble... like a plague of locusts" identifies this transient railway workforce as the likely source of the armed men who overhear the father's boast and rob him -- ordinary villagers would have had no reason to attack a man they likely knew.