In the opening to his article ‘History, Power, and Incomplete Epistolarity in Post-Soviet Cinema’, scholar Seth Graham claims that one of the fundamental features of epistolarity as presented in the cinema of the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces is the absence of an obligatory reciprocity between letter-writer and letter-recipient. If, traditionally, the epistolary exchange between self and other is sustained by the subsequent alternation of first- and second-person positions among interlocutors, in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, Graham argues, this precondition is problematized, challenged, and even rejected. Such films, he claims, not only feature letters that do not fit within orthodox descriptions of the medium – ‘open letters, forged letters, letters to dead or unreal addressees’ etc. – but also have their ontological status modified through the interference of specifically cinematic techniques. To film a letter is to make decisions about how to present it, to alter it, and hence to shape both its contents and the projected self-image of the parties involved.

While Graham's thesis was almost certainly not designed with the cinema of Kira Muratova specifically in mind – prominent in his discussion are analyses of Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent (1960) as well as post-Soviet works from outside the Russian Federation and Ukraine – her work supports his account. Muratova's cinema features not only a plethora of epistolary forms presented in various formats – read out loud, dictated, shown on screen – but her work also importantly questions the primacy of the connection between the letter and the written word.