Postmaster reads Herastakov's letter

The Postmaster’s decision to open Khlestakov’s letter turns the town’s mistaken identification into an undeniable public revelation: the supposed inspector is not an inspector at all. The letter makes the deception legible in Khlestakov’s own careless account, while exposing how the officials’ fear has allowed a penniless visitor to pass for a powerful figure and enjoy their hospitality, loans, and deference.

The letter and its discovery

The Postmaster rushes in carrying an unsealed letter and announces that the official the town has taken for a government inspector is no inspector. He explains that the letter came through the post office and that its address, Pochtamtskaya Street, caught his attention. Rather than treating it as ordinary private correspondence, he assumes Khlestakov may have found something wrong in the post-office department and be reporting it to the government. That suspicion prompts him to break the seal and read the letter.

The scene’s revelation is therefore produced by another misuse of official position. The Postmaster treats access to the mail as permission to investigate a private communication, just as the town’s officials have treated their offices as instruments of personal advantage. His intervention does expose Khlestakov, but the method itself belongs to the same compromised administrative world the play has been displaying. The letter is not brought forward by a proper inquiry; it becomes evidence because an official opens it for his own reasons.

What Khlestakov tells Triapichkin

In his account to Triapichkin, Khlestakov describes arriving at the town in desperate financial circumstances. An infantry captain has taken his last penny on the way, and the innkeeper has wanted to send him to jail. The sudden reversal, he says, came from his Saint Petersburg appearance and dress: the town mistook him for a governor-general. He is now staying in the Governor’s home, where he is enjoying himself and flirting with both the Governor’s wife and daughter, while considering which woman to pursue first.

The letter also names the material benefits of the mistake. Khlestakov says that people lend him as much money as he wants, and he treats the townspeople as amusing originals whose behavior would make Triapichkin laugh. The confidence with which he describes his reception contrasts sharply with the circumstances that brought him there: he had been nearly penniless, facing the innkeeper’s threat, before local officials and their families began treating him as a man of exceptional rank.

His letter’s account also punctures his grander performance. Earlier, Khlestakov has imagined himself at the center of high government, claiming that thirty-five thousand couriers came to summon him to direct a department. Now his own correspondence presents the source of his sudden importance as a misreading of his clothes and appearance, and his principal gains as borrowed money and access to the Governor’s household. The difference is not simply between truth and a single boast: the letter lets the audience see how readily his fantasies and opportunism flourish once the town supplies the authority he lacks.

The town’s exposure

The assembled officials insist that the letter be read aloud, turning a private message intended for Triapichkin into a public account of their credulity. Khlestakov’s description of the household and his flirtation with its women reveals what the town has been allowing under the mistaken belief that he possesses secret authority. The Governor had already treated the supposed inspector’s connections with ministers and the court as a possible route to promotion, even imagining that he might become a general. The letter strips that hope of its supposed foundation: the visitor has no such official power, and the Governor’s ambitions have been built on an error.

The deception’s exposure also sets Khlestakov’s amusement against testimony about the Governor’s conduct. A merchant has described soldiers quartered on townspeople, goods taken from shops, and cloth carried away to the Governor’s house. A locksmith’s wife has complained that her husband was ordered to serve as a soldier before his turn, contrary to the law as she understands it. Against these concrete grievances, Khlestakov’s description of the townspeople as laughable originals is revealingly self-serving: he enjoys their submission without understanding, or caring to understand, the harms that have made them vulnerable to authority.

Dramatic significance

The letter changes the meaning of the town’s earlier behavior without changing what the officials have done. They had responded to the prospect of an incognito inspector with secret instructions by trying to satisfy, impress, and appease the supposed representative of the government. Their mistaken belief has given Khlestakov a borrowed status; his correspondence now exposes both the error and the eagerness with which they accepted it. The recognition is comic in its abruptness, but its target extends beyond one impostor: the officials’ own expectation of inspection has made them susceptible to precisely the spectacle of rank they fear.

The post office, normally a channel of communication between distant people, becomes the mechanism that collapses the town’s carefully sustained illusion. The letter’s original destination, Triapichkin in Saint Petersburg, points away from the local circle in which Khlestakov has been treated as a dignitary. Its ending gives the impostor a far less exalted destination as well: he asks that future correspondence reach him in the Village of Podkatilovka in Saratov Governorate, and the letter supplies Triapichkin’s detailed Saint Petersburg street address. The grand official persona and the mundane particulars of delivery occupy the same document, leaving the town’s imagined inspector exposed as a visitor whose real connections are personal, accidental, and precarious.