A romantic novella became the leading genre of Russian prose in the 1830s. Romanticism, drawn to noble heroes and fierce passions, conveyed the delicate life of the human soul and its inner upheavals. Faint dreams and visions, riddles, witchcraft, and German Gothic motifs—all of it carries the reader into a space of feelings and fantasies. This edition includes lesser-known and forgotten novellas by V. Zhukovsky, A. Pogorelsky, A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, A. Veltman, V. Odoevsky, D. Venevitinov, E. Rostopchina, A. Herzen, E. Gan, and A. Fet.