Rita & Volga region in Ada

Describing his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama (Van's stage name), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions his partner Rita, a Crimean cabaret dancer who sang the tango tune in Russian:  

Neither was the sheer physical pleasure of maniambulation a negligible factor, and the peacock blotches with which the carpet stained the palms of his hands during his gloveless dance routine seemed to be the reflections of a richly colored nether world that he had been the first to discover. For the tango, which completed his number on his last tour, he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer in a very short scintillating frock cut very low on the back. She sang the tango tune in Russian:

Pod znóynïm nébom Argentínï,

Pod strástnïy góvor mandolinï

‘Neath sultry sky of Argentina,

To the hot hum of mandolina

Fragile, red-haired ‘Rita’ (he never learned her real name), a pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale, where, she nostalgically said, the Crimean cornel, kizil’, bloomed yellow among the arid rocks, bore an odd resemblance to Lucette as she was to look ten years later. During their dance, all Van saw of her were her silver slippers turning and marching nimbly in rhythm with the soles of his hands. He recouped himself at rehearsals, and one night asked her for an assignation. She indignantly refused, saying she adored her husband (the make-up fellow) and loathed England. (1.30)

An American movie actress, Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino, 1918-87) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest child of two dancers. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, was of Spanish Roma/Gitano descent from Castilleja de la Cuesta, a little town near Seville, Spain. Her mother, Volga Margaret Hayworth (1897-1945), was an American dancer and vaudevillian of Irish and English descent who had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies. Rita Hayworth used her mother's maiden name as her professional surname. Rita' mother, Volga Hayworth brings to mind the Volga region and similar watersheds mentioned by Van when he describes his novel Letters from Terra:

On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)

On Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) is represented by Khan Sosso (Soso Dzhugashvili is Stalin's Georgian name) and Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (one of the two seconds in Demon Veen's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky). Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions Richard Leonard Churchill's novel about a certain Crimean Khan:

Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855–1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.

Before the family dinner Van tells Demon (Van's and Ada's father) that he is resting after his torrid affair, in London, with his tango-partner:

‘I must warn Marina,’ said Demon after a gum-rinse and a slow swallow, ‘that her husband should stop swilling tittery, and stick to French and Califrench wines — after that little stroke he had. I met him in town recently, near Mad Avenue, saw him walking toward me quite normally, but then as he caught sight of me, a block away, the clockwork began slowing down and he stopped — oh, helplessly! — before he reached me. That’s hardly normal. Okay. Let our sweethearts never meet, as we used to say, up at Chose. Only Yukonians think cognac is bad for the liver, because they have nothing but vodka. Well, I’m glad you get along so well with Ada. That’s fine. A moment ago, in that gallery, I ran into a remarkably pretty soubrette. She never once raised her lashes and answered in French when I — Please, my boy, move that screen a little, that’s right, the stab of a sunset, especially from under a thunderhead, is not for my poor eyes. Or poor ventricles. Do you like the type, Van — the bowed little head, the bare neck, the high heels, the trot, the wiggle, you do, don’t you?’

‘Well, sir —’

(Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent.)

‘— Well, I’m resting after my torrid affair, in London, with my tango-partner whom you saw me dance with when you flew over for that last show — remember?’

‘Indeed, I do. Curious, you calling it that.’

‘I think, sir, you’ve had enough brandy.’ (1.38)

In 1940 Van's novel Letters from Terra (1892) was made into a film by Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director. Ada played the gitanilla in Don Juan's Last Fling, Yuzlik's movie that Van and Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall. The gitanilla is a Gypsy girl. Rita Hayworth's father was a Gypsy. The surname Hayworth makes one think of a bundle of hay, as in a letter of June 22, 1821, to Thomas Moore Byron calls the world:

The world is a bundle of hay, 

Mankind are the asses who pull; 

Each tugs it a different way, 

And the greatest of all is John Bull!

Small wonder that Rita (Van's partner) loathes England. Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, one hundred and twenty years, day for day, after Byron wrote his letter to Moore. A major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II was the Battle of Stalingrad (17 July 1942 – 2 February 1943). In 1961 Stalingrad (prior to 1925 Tsaritsyn) was renamed Volgograd, after the river that flows in it.