On this episode, Peter Orner joined us in person in the TPR studios in San Antonio.
On this episode Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss stories by the Russian writer, Varlam Shalamov.
He was a journalist and a writer. In 1936, he was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. After surviving 15 years in prison campus, he was released and would go on to write short fictional stories that reflect the years he spent in the Gulag.
The New York Review of Books (NYRB) published Kolyma Stories, in 2018. The translation is by Donald Rayfield. This volume, along with a second titled Sketches of the Criminal World with a translation by Alissa Valles, make up the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories— the only ones based on the authorized Russian text.
As remarkable as this access to these stories 90 years after Shalamov was first arrested, is how they can still matter so much.
In 1951, when he started writing, Shalamov was focused on a particular place and time — not as a journalist, but as a story writer.
He brings such humanity to the telling, a poetry to the descriptions of the place, the hunger of the people, the uncertainty and the fragility of life that ruled the day.
For us in 2026 there are still challenging themes to understand — about persecution and inhumanity.
But there is far more than that, and we find that we are moved by glimmers of resonance and of hope and light in the most abject and distant of places.
Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss “Berries” by Varlam Shalamov. They also reference the stories “At Night” and “RUR.” All of the stories can be found in the collection, Kolyma Stories — translated by Donald Rayfield and published by New York Review of Books.
