person
the narrator (moy-razgovor-s-pochtmeysterom)
also: the customer
The unnamed first-person narrator, who receives a one-ruble money packet sent by his mother and uses the occasion to interrogate the local postmaster, Semyon Alekseich, on the pointless bureaucratic ceremony surrounding registered money packets -- the sealing wax, the ledgers, the identity certification -- comparing it unfavorably to an idealized frictionless postal system "abroad."