Abstract: "A Letter that Never Reached Russia" has mainly been read as a nostalgic farewell to the narrator's first love who remained in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, while he chose exile. Often the reason why the letter never reached Russia has been attributed to censorship, but, more likely, it never was sent because, in the process of composing his response to her letter, he realized that she, now a long-time citizen of the Soviet Union, would be unable to understand his complex feelings about living in Weimar Berlin. In spite of his being a lonely declassé stranger there he is also a happy flâneur whom nobody can order to be constantly optimistic, or reject foxtrot and shimmy, or how to react to a suicide, or in any other way subordinate himself to emotional and intellectual coercion. There is therefore no returning home, or first loves, not even in letters.
Irene Masing-Delic (Mon,) studied this question.