Russian Classical Short Story Pages

Page Estimation for Classic Russian Short Stories

To estimate how many pages a short story fills, you use pages = total_words / words_per_page, and pocket editions usually count on 250–320 words per page. When Russian short fiction is translated into Portuguese it tends to grow by about 15–20%, since Cyrillic morphology packs more into fewer characters than Romance languages do.

A few canonical works show how wide the range gets. Anton Chekhov’s “A Senhora com o Cachorrinho” (1899) runs about 30 pages. Leo Tolstoy’s “A Morte de Iván Ilítch” (1886) reaches roughly 80 pages, right on the line between a long story and a short novel. Nikolai Gogol’s “O Capote” (1842) lands near 50 pages, while Dostoyevsky’s “Sonhos de Um Homem Ridículo” (1877) comes to about 30. In Brazil, Editora 34 has put together a respected catalog of these works, a good part of it translated by the late Boris Schnaiderman (1917–2016), the dean of Russian-Portuguese literary translation.

Applications

It comes in handy when a literature professor is planning a reading list, when a translator needs to quote a project, when an anthology editor wants to balance a volume, or when a book club is trying to gauge how long a session will run. Students in Slavic studies can also lean on it to size up primary-source assignments.

FAQ

Why is “Ivan Ilyich” almost a novel? Russian critics file it as a povest (novella), which runs longer than a rasskaz (short story). At around 80 pages it falls between the two forms.

Does translation change page count? It does. Portuguese translations from Russian usually run 15–20% longer than the original, thanks to expanded syntax and the explanatory footnotes you often find in Editora 34 editions.

What is a good edition to use as reference? Editora 34’s Russian collection (Coleção Leste) matches the word counts of major academic editions and has become the de facto Brazilian standard.