After the graduation from the Philharmonic Institute, where she studied under Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Litovtseva joined the Mikhail Borodai Troupe and for several years worked in the Russian province, mostly in Kazan, Saratov and Astrakhan.
It was only in 1905 that Litovtseva received her first two substantial parts, Vera Pavlovna in Ivan Mironych by Evgeny Chirikov and Fima in Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun.
A period of severe depression followed (at one point she became so close to committing suicide as to buy a revolver), but in 1908 she returned to work as a reader in drama and stage director at the MAT Second studio, where she produced The Green Ring by Zinaida Gippius (1916) and Mladost by Leonid Andreyev (1918).
[1] In 1922, after the Kachalov Group, which she was part of, returned to Moscow having spent three years in Europe, Litovtseva resumed working for the theatre.
She directed Nicolas the First and the Decembrists (1926, by Alexander Kugel based on two Dmitry Merezhkovsky novels) and later Armoured Train 14-69 by Vsevolod Ivanov (1927), Our Youth (1930, S. Kartashev's stage adaptation of Viktor Kin's 1928 novel On the Other Side), Talents and Admirers by Alexander Ostrovsky (1933), Three Sisters (1940), Uncle Vanya, 1947, in which she also appeared as Voynitskaya), and The Fruits of Enlightenment (1951).