Kamerger Street is a Moscow street whose importance in the novel rests on the rooms and lives gathered around it. It shelters Yurii Andreievich when Evgraf helps him disappear, becomes the address to which his body is brought after his death, and unexpectedly reunites Larisa Feodorovna with a place she remembers from her first husband’s student years. The same interior thus holds refuge, bereavement, and recognition: a private geography through which family histories cross without having been planned.

A refuge arranged by Evgraf

When Yurii Andreievich has been living under the eyes of those searching for him, he unexpectedly encounters Evgraf on Bronnaia Street. Evgraf has arrived in Moscow without warning and quickly understands the substance of his half brother’s troubles. As they walk along a narrow, crowded street, he devises a practical plan: Yurii should disappear and remain in hiding for a time.

Evgraf takes a room for him in Kamerger Street, near the Arts Theater, supplies him with money, and uses his influence to seek him a hospital post where he can continue his research. He also promises to resolve the uncertainty surrounding Yurii’s family in Paris: either Yurii will join them or they will come to him. The arrangements restore Yurii’s spirits, although the source of Evgraf’s power remains a mystery that Yurii does not try to solve. Kamerger Street is therefore not simply concealment; it is the temporary setting for a possible return to work and family life.

The room itself faces south and looks across the roofs toward the summer sun over Okhotny Ryad. It stands almost next to the theater, while the street below lies in shadow. This specific contrast gives Yurii’s hiding place a double character: tucked into the city and protected from view, yet still opening onto light, work, and the larger life of Moscow.

The room becomes a funeral chamber

After Yurii’s death, his body is brought to the flat in Kamerger Street, his last registered address. The room contains the table at which he had written; there is no other table. His manuscripts are put away in a drawer, and a coffin, described as resembling a roughly carved canoe, is set on top. In this altered use of an ordinary working room, the place where his writing took shape becomes the place where his dead body is displayed.

Flowers fill the room: white lilac, difficult to find at that season, along with cyclamen and cineraria in pots and baskets. They screen the windows, so that light reaches the coffin only thinly; the shadows fall across the table like branches and leaves that have just stopped swaying. The scene makes the room’s familiar objects bear two histories at once. The writing table remains, the manuscripts are nearby but put away, and the flowering branches lend the stillness of death an image drawn from living growth.

The funeral is organized under practical pressures as well as grief. Cremation has become common, and those arranging it hope to secure a pension for the children, their education, and Marina’s position at the post office. They decide against a church service in favor of a civil cremation, notifying the authorities and expecting their representatives. Kamerger Street is thus also where private mourning meets the institutional conditions shaping the family’s future.

Larisa Feodorovna’s return

When Yurii’s friends arrive, they bring Marina with them. Overwhelmed by shock, she throws herself to the floor and beats her head against the long wooden chest in the hallway. She clings to the body and can scarcely be separated from it when it is time for the washing and the placing in the coffin. By the following day, her violent lamentation has given way to exhausted numbness. She remains in the room through the night, and the baby is brought to her there to be fed. The flat is consequently not only a place of public funeral arrangements but also a space in which grief, caregiving, and the immediate demands of life persist together.

Among those who enter is Larisa Feodorovna, whose arrival seems accidental even to her. She has come to Moscow from Irkutsk and, while walking through streets she barely recognizes, suddenly finds Kamerger Street familiar. She explains that her husband, Antipov, had lived as a student in this very house and room. Unaware that the occupants had changed, she went in to look for the former tenants; instead, she found a crowd and a coffin, and recognized Yurii among those present.

The reunion with the room gives Larisa’s search through the city an unexpected destination: she has come upon a site that connects her past with Yurii’s last days, though she did not know he had lived there. In conversation with Evgraf, she says that Antipov was shot. Evgraf interrupts to correct her: Strelnikov shot himself. The exchange exposes a painful disparity between what Larisa believes about her husband’s fate and what Evgraf knows, while placing that revelation inside the very room where Antipov once lived and Yurii now lies dead.

Papers, memory, and disappearance

Evgraf asks Larisa not to leave after the cremation and seeks her help sorting Yurii’s papers, since she knew his life more fully than almost anyone. She stays in Kamerger Street for several days, and the sorting begins with her assistance but is completed without her. The manuscripts make the flat more than a last address: it becomes a temporary meeting place for people who can supply different parts of Yurii’s history, and for the work of arranging that history after his death.

Larisa later goes out and does not return. The narrative says she must have been arrested in the street and imagines that she probably died in an unrecorded northern concentration camp, reduced to a nameless number on a list that was subsequently lost. Her disappearance follows the brief interval in which she and Evgraf share the work of remembering Yurii. Kamerger Street therefore gathers people together only provisionally: the room preserves their encounters, while the lives attached to it remain vulnerable to separation and erasure.