Everything you need to understand or teach Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.
The narrator is out with a companion on a job to collect the needles of the Siberian dwarf cedar tree. They are both exhausted and in bad shape, and the narrator looks at it as a big break to be on the assignment of collecting needles.
Glebov goes out with his companion at night, to dig up a corpse of someone that died...
Kolyma Tales Lesson Plans contain 121 pages of teaching material, including: