Walking down an aisle of a Russian bookstore or library, one sees numerous books with the title Rasskazy i povesti. This common title for an author’s collected works is difficult to translate: it could be ‘short stories and short novels’ or ‘short and long stories’. As these awkward pairings show, the povest' occupies the space between the short story and the novel, both in length and in the scope of its engagement with its subject.