Throughout his career as an author of fiction, &Chachek;exov
returns again and again to letters as a foregrounding focus for his
concern with communication. A letter provides a sort of snapshot of
the six elements involved in any verbal communication as outlined by
Roman Jakobson in his classic
In the present paper, after several examples of epistolary
breakdown in &Chachek;exov's early works, I will present a close
reading text
of another person's words and behavior) are
discovered, decoded, and interpreted by a husband who is suspicious of
his wife (and has his suspicions confirmed by her). The discovery of a
compromising letter by a suspicious husband, even if by chance, is of
course a well-worn cliche of melodramatic novels of
adultery. &Chachek;exov shifts attention from the hackneyed
possibilities for plot to questions of interpretation and judgment,
the epistemological and ethical issues that arise from intercepting
texts not intended for us. By usurping the role of the addressee and
arrogating to himself the right of interpretation (or judgment), the
husband attempts to control meaning, but ironically reveals himself as
a closed reader. His readings, particularly of the photograph, are in
fact projections of his own obsessions onto texts that may not in fact
support his interpretation. The story ends with him compulsively
writing and rewriting the salutation of a letter to no one. Locked in
his own readings (or misreadings) of texts, he also fails in the role
of addresser, attempting contact with a non-existent addressee. Such
mechanical writing is at best an imitation of a probe to establish a
channel of communication, but there is no message and no
recipient. This displaced exercise in non-communication reflects the
absence of communication in the marriage itself, the lack of mutual
contact between suprug and supruga, with the echoing quality of the
terms masking the absence of any real marital harmony. In an analogous
fashion, the plot situation of adultery has deteriorated into a
literary dead end. The reader is forced to consider not what happens
next (nothing apparently) but rather what has happened, how did this
sorry situation come about (and in fact there is little evidence
provided). Like the husband puzzling over the text of the telegram to
his wife in order to figure out who it is from and what it says, the
reader must puzzle over the story, trying to make sense of a text in
another language, that of a failed marriage.