Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky exchanged "letters" that were not a correspondence but a literary duel, staged for the public and meant for the judgement of posterity

Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky exchanged "letters" that were not a correspondence but a literary duel, staged for the public and meant for the judgement of posterity. Both understood that they would be read far beyond the Lithuanian border.

The open letter is a genre with a catch. Its "openness" conceals a deception: an ordinary letter is addressed to one person or to a narrow circle, whereas an open letter is written for everyone except the addressee himself. The addressee is needed merely as a pretext.

Yet even this theatrical device is subject to the laws of diplomacy. The presence of an addressee may be a mere formality, but the form cannot be devoid of quite definite specifics. And the more public the letter, the more strictly it must be calibrated. When a text consists of a single intonation, and emotion outweighs substance threefold, the open letter turns into a televised spectacle, which needs not a reader but an auditorium. If indignation and spite drown out the statement of the case, the reader sees not a position but a pose. And that is already a purely theatrical phenomenon.

Hence the trouble with the genre today: there are plenty of loud appeals, and almost none that are carefully weighed. One cannot address a public gesture past the addressee and call it an invitation to talk. One cannot summon someone to conversation by shouting, any more than one can invite him to dialogue with insults. No one will enter a boarded-up door.

The strength of a document lies not in the absence of feeling but in its subordination to fact and form, or, if you like, to decorum. A conversation that opens with the salutation "Disrespected Addressee" becomes a benefit performance, for some reason packed into an envelope.