Который is, itself, just like every other question word. Its adopted form as a relative pronoun has just become more prominent than its "original", vanilla use as an interrogative one.

Кото́рую кни́гу вы хоти́те?

It's pretty much entirely like English "which".

I'd imagine the word какой used to be reserved for "Which KIND of" or "What KIND of", but over time melded into который's base meaning "Which one" as well. But nevermind all that, just my theories. What's important is that который holds a similar formal register to when English speakers choose "..., which..." over "..., that....". Keep in mind however that Russian has a pretty different scale for formality. Formality in English often comes off as a joke... Anyone who says "with whom" in English automatically seems fake, on some level. This is partly because so incredibly few people understand "whom". Our formality is almost... broken. Whereas in Russian, it's just a bigger, more precise word. When in doubt, sponge up more native Russian text and your brain will formulate these kind of abstract things for you.


1) Верх! Now there's a fun topic.

When it comes to these localized directional words, Russian is incredibly tidy. We start with верх, a noun meaning somewhere along the lines of "hight", "peak", or "top". Now, besides the verbs formed from верх, there are a whole list of adverbs formed from it, to describe all sorts of up-ness. Each word is built using various corresponding prepositions.

Notice, that these are all basically just the noun верх, as an object of a preposition, with the space removed to make a new word. (similar lists exist for other directions, like "down", or "left")

наверх - upward (describing motion in an upward direction, ONto something, hence на)
вверх - upward (describing motion upward, into something, hence в. That something may just be the space above something else)
вверху - above (describing position above, inside)
наверху - above (describing position on top of, above)
сверху - from above (motion down from, dow)
кверху - towards above (I believe this treats the above as a destination/location- somewhere of conceptual significance like a floor of a building) (I've never seen кверху yet, not as common I think)
поверх - Understanding по is important here. It's sort of like "across the above space", or "over". По doesn't have a REAL equivalent in English, the translation varies. Across generally works but sometimes it describes general dispersion along a surface.
[the у ending on верх is an old ending for a marginal case called the locative. Used instead of prepositional, only when after на or в. The locative case ending is singular only, and adds a stressed у. You'll only see a few words here and there that even express the locative.]

In his correction, the man looks across over the papers to the guy.

Also keep in mind, some of these can act as prepositions as well, for when you need to say "...verb... above the water". Here we need to attribute the water to the aboveness, and we can't just have some nominative floating around so genitive is generally the way it goes. The mound of papers is the water in our case.

We don't really distinguish between these concepts in English
The position versus movement debate is one you've already seen with куда versus где, it's the same deal here. The other distinction is the one between наверх and вверх, among others. That's the harder difference of this list.

Now, you wanted to describe "up from the papers (which were in front of him) to the man". As for the exact way to say what you mean in Russian, I can't give you a vetted answer, but I believe you were close. "Up from the papers" in this case, is focusing on "up from below" rather than "into above". Perhaps снизу would be involved. Note:

Russian Word Formation - The Verb of Motion , this page gives some fantastic information, for now, I want to draw your attention to the chart labeled Prepositions Expressing Basic Motions, as it will explain the main flaw with your first translation of the action. This chart also describes the верх prepositions from earlier. Explains why кверху is as significant as it is.

http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/adverb.html , here's a better version of everything I just explained