Describing Flavita (the Russian Scrabble), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Gritz and Venezia Rossa:
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
By July the ten A’s had dwindled to nine, and the four D’s to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost — faking the fate of its apostrophizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards, in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal note) knows no bounds. (1.36)
Baron Klim Avidov is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. The Gritz seems to hint at Mme Gritsatsuev, "a passionate woman, a poet's dream," a character in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928). Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) is a poem by Alexander Blok. In Kholodnyi veter ot laguny (“The cold wind from the lagoon”), the second poem of his cycle Venetsiya ("Venice") included in Ital’yanskie stikhi ("Italian Verses," 1909), Blok mentions giganty (the giants) on St Mark's Clocktower and Salomeya (Salome) walking with the poet’s bloody head on a black dish:
Холодный ветер от лагуны.
Гондол безмолвные гроба.
Я в эту ночь - больной и юный -
Простёрт у львиного столба.
На башне, с песнию чугунной,
Гиганты бьют полночный час.
Марк утопил в лагуне лунной
Узорный свой иконостас.
В тени дворцовой галлереи,
Чуть озаренная луной,
Таясь, проходит Саломея
С моей кровавой головой.
Всё спит - дворцы, каналы, люди,
Лишь призрака скользящий шаг,
Лишь голова на чёрном блюде
Глядит с тоской в окрестный мрак.
In "The Twelve Chairs" Ostap Bender calls Vorob'yaninov gigant mysli, otets russkoy demokratii i osoba, priblizhyonnaya k imperatoru (the master-mind, the father of Russian democracy and a person close to the emperor):
— Строгий секрет! Государственная тайна!
Остап показал рукой на Воробьянинова:
— Кто, по-вашему, этот мощный старик? Не говорите, вы не можете этого знать. Это — гигант мысли, отец русской демократии и особа, приближенная к императору.
"Strict secrecy. A state secret." He pointed to Vorobyaninov. "Who do you think this powerful old man is? Don't say you don't know. He's the master-mind, the father of Russian democracy and a person close to the emperor." (Chapter XIV “The Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare”)
In the Sorbonne (a cheap hotel in Stargorod, the city where Mme Gritsatsuev lives) Father Fyodor attempts to sting Bender with a pencil pushed through a keyhole (cf. Walter C. Keyway, Esq.), but Bender snatches it, carves a rude word on its edge and pushes the pencil back through the keyhole of the priest's door.
Describing his performance as Mascodagama, Van compares himself to a masked giant, fully eight feet tall, and mentions a female Sorbonne correspondent:
Mascodagama’s fame reached inevitably the backwoods of America: a photograph of him, masked, it is true, but unable to mislead a fond relative or faithful retainer, was reproduced by the Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano and Luga papers in the first week of 1888; but the accompanying reportage was not. The work of a poet, and only a poet (‘especially of the Black Belfry group,’ as some wit said), could have adequately described a certain macabre quiver that marked Van’s extraordinary act.
The stage would be empty when the curtain went up; then, after five heartbeats of theatrical suspense, something swept out of the wings, enormous and black, to the accompaniment of dervish drums. The shock of his powerful and precipitous entry affected so deeply the children in the audience that for a long time later, in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the ‘primordial qualm,’ a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage. Into the harsh light of its gaudily carpeted space a masked giant, fully eight feet tall, erupted, running strongly in the kind of soft boots worn by Cossack dancers. A voluminous, black shaggy cloak of the burka type enveloped his silhouette inquiétante (according to a female Sorbonne correspondent — we’ve kept all those cuttings) from neck to knee or what appeared to be those sections of his body. A Karakul cap surmounted his top. A black mask covered the upper part of his heavily bearded face. The unpleasant colossus kept strutting up and down the stage for a while, then the strut changed to the restless walk of a caged madman, then he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (perhaps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head.
Russian for “lagoon,” Laguna seems to hint at the first line of Blok’s poem Kholodnyi veter ot laguny. In his essay Venetsiya ("Venice," 1911) Kuprin confesses that he was tempted to steal an engraved steel key of one of the doors in the Doge's Palace:
Простой стальной ключ, всунутый в замок двери, отчеканен рукой великолепного мастера, который, может быть, даже не оставил своего имени истории, и я должен, к моему стыду, признаться, что только большое усилие воли помешало мне украсть этот ключ на память о Венеции.
In his essay Kuprin mentions Botticelli's mosaic in the tomb of Cardinal Zeno depicting the whole story of Herod, Herodias, Salome and John the Baptist. According to Kuprin, Salome's famous dance as painted by Botticelli would have made Ida Rubinstein (the ballerina who was portrayed as Salome by Serov) blush and turn away:
А знаменитый танец Саломеи заставил бы покраснеть и отвернуться Иду Рубинштейн.
На Саломее... на ней, то есть, я хотел сказать, на этой длинноногой прекрасной женщине, с невинно наклонённой набок головой и с удивлённо поднятыми кверху тонкими бровями... вы понимаете, что я хочу сказать?.. На ней нет совсем ничего.
Pokrasnet' (to blush) comes from krasnyi (red). Hence "Venezia Rossa" (rosso is Italian for "red"). In Botticelli's painting the head of naked Salome is innocently bent nabok (on one side). Ada's habit to blush distresses Van "as being much more improper than any act that might cause it" (1.20). Ida Rubinstein is a namesake of Ida Larivière, Lucette's governess who tells her charge that Ardis means in Greek ‘the point of an arrow:’
He found the game rather fatiguing, and toward the end played hurriedly and carelessly, not deigning to check ‘rare’ or ‘obsolete’ but quite acceptable possibilities provided by a loyal dictionary. As to ambitious, incompetent and temperamental Lucette, she had to be, even at twelve, discreetly advised by Van who did so chiefly because it saved time and brought a little closer the blessed moment when she could be bundled off to the nursery, leaving Ada available for the third or fourth little flourish of the sweet summer day. Especially boring were the girls’ squabbles over the legitimacy of this or that word: proper names and place names were taboo, but there occurred borderline cases, causing no end of heartbreak, and it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant ‘the point of an arrow’ — but only in Greek, alas. (1.36)
See also the updated version of my previous post: “Chto, vïspalsya, Vahn in Ada; Zemblan crown jewels in Pale Fire."