Liteyny Street

Liteyny Street is a Petersburg thoroughfare that repeatedly becomes a threshold between public scrutiny and Golyadkin’s private unease. At its junction with Nevsky Prospect, he is recognized by his office chief; later, after encountering a mysterious stranger, he finds himself back at the same turning, running toward an encounter he fears and seems unable to avoid.

Setting and Route

The street is first named as the point where Golyadkin’s hired carriage turns into Nevsky Prospect. From the carriage window he searches both sides of the road, trying to look decorous whenever he thinks someone may be watching. The route places his carefully staged appearance in public view, where the possibility of recognition quickly unsettles him.

The Doctor’s Door

When Andrey Filippovitch passes in a fashionable droshky, Golyadkin recognizes his superior and sees that concealment is impossible. After the droshky has gone, he regrets not having greeted him openly and imagines explaining that he, too, has been invited to dinner. Instead, he orders the driver to turn back to Liteyny Street, saying that he urgently needs to tell his doctor something important.

Golyadkin gets out at a five-storey house on the street and climbs, out of breath, to the second floor, where a brass plate identifies Krestyan Ivanovitch Rutenspitz as a doctor of medicine and surgery. He tries to persuade himself that the visit is proper: it is his own business, there is nothing reprehensible in it, and he can behave as though he simply stopped in while passing. The street thus connects an episode of social embarrassment to an attempted appeal for medical reassurance.

The Turning After the Encounter

Later, after a stranger has abruptly turned away from him, Golyadkin runs without looking back, stumbling twice and losing the other boot’s golosh. When he finally slows to catch his breath, he realizes that he has crossed part of Nevsky Prospect and is standing at the turning into Liteyny Street. The return is involuntary: he has reached the same junction without being aware of his route.

He imagines that another misfortune will meet him on the way and expects to encounter the stranger again. Yet he also positively desires that meeting, provided it will make his ordeal end quickly. The turning therefore marks a shift from the earlier attempt to manage how he appears to others to a state in which fear and anticipation propel him forward. A soaked, shivering dog attaches itself to him as he continues along the street, while a long-forgotten idea presses back into his mind.

Narrative Significance

Liteyny Street links separate moments through repetition of place and reversal of purpose. On the first passage, Golyadkin turns back deliberately, trying to regain control after being seen by his chief; on the later one, he discovers himself at the street’s entrance after a flight he barely seems to govern. The same urban junction that offers a route to the doctor becomes a point of return in a mounting crisis, making the geography register his movement from guarded self-presentation toward helpless expectation.