Alexey Sklyarenko: 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: ... "But the wife is not a gauntlet that one would shake off from one's fair hand"

JM: Widowed "Krug had only one glove, and he had forgotten his glasses, so could not reread the careful note Quist had given him with all the passwords and addresses and a sketch map and the key to the code of Krug's whole life." Now, thanks to Alexey, I may now understand why it befell Kinbote the concoction of a Zemblan proverb about the happy lost glove and, perhaps, the reason for Krug's dropping the other glove to follow the first one: "Watching the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real, whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle the question, he let his mateless glove fall from the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and was gone." (On the other hand it's probable that my perplexity remains unsolved).