Had JM taken the trouble to understand my post before commenting on it, she would have known that the White Corridor (see my quote from Khodasevich) is in Kremlin.
 
Rukavishnikov comes from rukavitsa (mitten; gauntlet). In Pushkin's "The Fairy Tale about Czar Saltan" (1831), the Swan Princess compares one's wife to rukavitsa:
 
Но жена не рукавица,
С белой ручки не стряхнёшь
 
(But the wife is not a gauntlet
that one would shake off from one's fair hand).
 
Белой (white) means here what krasnyi (red) sometimes means: "fair." The final reconciliation between the whites and the reds?
 
Tenderly she [Lucette] shook her juweled head... Then she walked before him as conscious of his gaze as if she were winning a prize for 'poise.' He [Van] could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches)... (Ada: 3.5)
 
Pushkin, "The Fairy Tale about Czar Saltan:"
 
Месяц под косой блестит,
А во лбу звезда горит;
А сама-то величава,
Выступает, будто пава
 
(The moon shines under her plait,
And the star burns in her forehead;
And she paces,
Stately as a peahen).
 
Пава (peahen) is mentioned in Ada (3.5): Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who's that stately dame?)
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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