Pushkin’s letters are among the most widely read and cited in the Russian epistolary tradition. In reviewing an edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Pushkin himself gave a psychological rationale for a fascination with an author’s sub-canonical works:

A writer’s letters (along with other sub-canonical types of writing, such as diaries, notebooks and marginalia) occupy a liminal space on the border of conventional literary and linguistic categories. Letters are written, but it is the oral nature of the genre that is emphasised in the very first lines of traditional manuals on letter writing: 'A letter is a conversation between those who are absent … To write a successful letter, imagine that you are in the presence of the one who will read you, that he is hearing the sound of your voice.'

The need 'to imagine that you are in the presence' of the addressee erodes the borders of individual authorship. In no other type of writing does an author have such strong obligations towards the reader and addressee: a shared frame of reference has to be established, the reader’s opinions taken into account and reactions anticipated. Pushkin was a past master of adjusting to the stylistic expectations of his correspondents, even to the point of mimicking their epistolary 'voices'.