Editor’s Note: A Russian translation of Toti O’Brien’s interview with Dimitris Lyacos was originally supposed to run this past August of 2025 in the journal Flagi. Ultimately, before the interview could run, state-authorities removed the site from the web and arrested its editor and co-founder, poet Glickeriy Ulunov.
Dimitris Lyacos is one of the most highly regarded European authors of the new millennium, recently hailed by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera as Greece’s probable candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature. The Italian edition of his new novel, Until the Victim Becomes our Own, was listed in this year’s Top Ten of the Turin International Book Fair. A few chapters from the novel were published in the English translation. In conjunction with the appearance of Chapter L (The Pittsburgh Review of Books, 2026), which focuses on imprisonment, Lyacos agreed to discuss a number of themes emerging from the text, especially as they allowed us to deepen a prior conversation on violence (The Common, August 2024). When our exchange began, the author was traveling in the URSS – hence, the topics we explored intertwined with his notes on contemporary prison conditions in the country. Months later, Lyacos’ translator, Katerina Basova, translated the interview into Russian and submitted it to the magazine Flagi, which accepted it for publication. Flagi, then, informed Basova that the piece would appear at the end of August, but censored. The omitted segment would be the one referring to Wagner. Flagi explained they were monitored, and could not do otherwise. Finally, we learned that the co-founder of the magazine, poet Glickeriy Ulunov, was arrested, and the magazine removed from online platforms. I believe these meta-textual developments are now inherent to the conversation itself. Mentioning them will hopefully amplify the resonance of what Lyacos and I originally debated.
Toti O’Brien: In our prior conversation about violence we remarked how often, since the birth of recorded history, penance inflicted by humans on humans translates into spatial barriers stating where the “punished” should or shouldn’t be—from which grounds they should be expelled or on which grounds they should be forcibly kept. Concepts such as exile, exodus, diaspora, banishment (and the opposite, ghetto, confinement, camp, prison, mental institution—or even center town and periphery) all derive from this imposition of physical boundaries.
Chapter L of Until the Victim Becomes our Own gives us the tour of a labor camp, seen through the eyes of an inmate introducing a newbie to the rules of the game. Unlike what commonly occurs in “regular” prisons, here’s a place where obedience reigns and convicts are too broken, too worn even for infighting. They don’t even compete for the piece of bread they fish out of an oil tin, each morning—their feed from sunrise to sunset. Such acquiescence is gained by weakening bodies beyond measure with discomfort, fatigue, sleep and food deprivation. Minds are wrecked instead through careful manipulation of space, time, and language—the few hammered commands, the meaningless propaganda, the vital information withheld.
Dimitris Lyacos: A prisoner enters the general population and will need to submit to the coercive rules of prison life. Like in a rite of passage, he will have to be separated from society and endure the long hardship of incarceration before he is rehabilitated. But why should we care, really? Εvery community has its share of castaways and it is not likely that we will be among them. Our footing on society is firm, and yet such “detention rituals” exercise a strange attraction upon us. We make and watch films about prisons. Rather than with the guards of the wardens, we identify with the likeable inmates, and we benefit from their fictional escapes to take leave from our restrained space and time routines. We go through the experience for an hour and a half—this is our rite of passage, a virtual one. Afterwards, we feel as if we had endured the fatigue, discomfort, sleep and food deprivation you mentioned. Time to go to bed! We are hugged by the walls of our bedrooms as soon as we turn off the screens that brought home such an unpleasant reality—a reality that, we know, gets much nastier and complex at a closer look. And yet, there is no harm in experiencing it as a surrogate, low-resolution fictional world. It is better than nothing, and it does “translate” a disturbing segment of life into our safe haven. We can learn something from this exposure, and if we are to gain knowledge, rough as it may be, why wouldn’t we accept this approximate “translation”? From our privileged position, what else can we do with regard to prisons and the like, besides talking about them?
As I am writing this, my plane is getting closer to Moscow. I am probably already flying over tens of former gulag camps and penal colonies, now hidden under the earth I intermittently see under the clouds. Slightly protruding under this hazy grid of fields, some pole or some shattered roof of the dilapidated soul-grinding machine is sure to be found. But I am over six miles above ground, and bound to not even take a glimpse of it. As Yul Brynner says at some point of Night flight from Moscow: “We all live in glass houses.”
TO: I am not sure what the quote refers to, but the idea of “glass house” immediately evokes the jail you describe in L, with its features of total control and privacy denied. Like a Coliseum or a stadium, it is a round building pierced with windows and doors. Circular imagery is pervasive: the inner courtyard with its center tower (named the Ring), the sun (openly identified like the power, the all-surveying eye), the clock with its hands relentlessly turning. Circles have no clear beginning or end, no visible entrance or exit. Circles can be vicious…
DL: With each of their points being visible from any other, circles encapsulate the idea of surveillance. They limit space, and they capture time in the hands of the clock. This “finality” is much needed by our prime watchers: God, the omniscient reader of all deeds and all thoughts or, more palpably, the State—the surveillant of citizens and their worldly affairs. In fact, the State would be blind and useless without surveillance. Surveillance, hypostatized as bureaucracy, is its nervous system. By the reception of information, it calculates and acts, readjusts, rationalizes and dehumanizes. Individuals, as objects of surveillance, devise fantasies about it: they imagine it as a homogeneous, abstract entity that looms over them, although they may sense its presence as more or less rarefied, “thicker” or “thinner.” Russia, for instance, impresses as one State of the “thick” kind, and that’s what I anticipated for my arrival. I expected some immediate foretaste of the lyricism of the frigid monster to greet me at Domodedovo Airport passport control. Instead, a thin, youngish lady with the playful and diligent eyes of a little girl browsed through my passport, paused, browsed faster and then, again, slower. Afterwards, she took out a little book of instructions, checked my passport against them, opened what seemed like a school notebook—its pages full of minute handwriting in blue ink—meticulously dragged her thin little finger under the lines, checked the passport once more and finally returned it to me. As I stayed waiting, a scene from Kafka’s Trial flashed through my mind—with the help of a washerwoman, Josef K. gets to see what is in the judge’s law book: pornographic drawings. A veil falls off all of a sudden: our fantasies and abstractions are dissipated when the empty socket of the State’s eye is filled by a human eye. This is quite different from being under a device’s surveillance, not knowing whether it’s off or on, or being embraced by a circular prison like the cupola of a cathedral. Jeremy Bentham was aware of that when he invented Panopticon. When you realize you may be watched from every angle, you feel guilty and you self-regulate. “Shall the sun of righteousness with healing in his wings arise; and ye shall go forth and grow as calves of the stall,” Malachi says in his book. Calves on the stall. Fenced. You are watched by the circle within and kept well clear of the circumference without.
TO: Sieged from all sides. With no chance of escape except taking flight, like Icarus, perhaps during yard time. But we know that the sun itself is a warden, and cannot be trusted. The facility in L (cell doors, always open, align with the corridor windows, which in turn open onto the central courtyard and are faced by other windows and doors, every cell being simultaneously in sight) illustrates a nightmare of brutal exposure. Though the last US Panopticon was officially closed in 2016, the concept is still applied, at least in partial form. Also, Bentham’s brainchild was readily exported and it also thrived abroad. Have you visited any Panopticon-like facilities? Or something that resembled them…
DL: Jeremy Bentham conceived the Panopticon while visiting his brother Samuel in the then Russian Empire, and he applied some of his ideas to devise a system that would facilitate prison labor. The rotunda architecture lends itself quite well to monitoring workers under forced conditions. A great idea (at a time when cameras were not yet available) that could be applied to other “gated communities” like hospitals, perhaps schools—but not monasteries: God’s eye isn’t hindered by walls. So, I thought I might blend the Panopticon (such as the Presidio Modelo, in Cuba, which also hosted Fidel Castro) with more straightforward prison facilities focused on labor (like the Angola, in Louisiana). The Angola didn’t start as a prison, but as a forced labor facility. It originally was “The Farm,” a slave plantation. The poor were convicted for petty crimes and then leased to work in it. So, in L, the inmates go out to work during the day and return to the Panopticon-like building to spend the night. But something else struck me about the Angola: Cain was the surname of its most famous warden, and I liked the thought that the biblical Cain of chapter A would make a cameo appearance in L under a warden’s hat. It suggested that physical violence had metamorphosed into control and surveillance, personified by Cain the warden. He was the chess player, and the inmates were confined on the chessboard. Surveillance affected their thoughts and dictated their movements: to paraphrase Stalin’s dictum, it had become the engineer of their souls. That is not only prison technology. In a milder form, it works in business as well. Bosses can enhance production by monitoring potential work-theft perpetrated by astute employees who take breaks when they shouldn’t. Overall, surveillance is economical: punishment becomes redundant as long as the individuals are kept on the right track by fear of being exposed. In penal facilities, however, surveillance mixes with punishment—a cocktail that is harder to drink, and can get increasingly harder depending on the facility. According to a youtube video I watched, whatever faults a western prison might have, it is still a five-star hotel compared to a Russian gulag. I agree, though I doubt whether the inmates of our well-tempered penitentiaries would find any consolation in that.
TO: So, control shapes the human soul for discipline to become infused, but success isn’t completely granted. In detention contexts, punishment still occurs with various degrees of intensity—actually, in a crescendo of which the gulag system has brushed the highest notes, as far as we know. Like Panocticons, though, gulags have become features of the past, belonging to history and literature. And yet, as a few days ago you flew towards Moscow, you mentioned “buried” traces. Are any of them visible? Have they scarred the territory, and what do the scars look like?
DL: They are in most cases invisible for the unsuspecting, or happen behind the curtain of everyday life. I am now in Tatarstan. As I couldn’t rent a car (western cards don’t work here due to the embargo) I followed a group of Russians in a bus to visit Raifa Monastery and the Sviyazhsk town-island. Raifa is beautifully situated on a lake, surrounded by a path philosophers used to stroll while meditating. Sviyazhsk is a Unesco World Heritage site, and among its discolored frescos there is a rare St. Christophorus with a horse’s head. Raifa, as well as Sviyazhsk, welcomes a great number of pilgrim-tourists. In gulag times, Raifa was a labor commune. Both places hosted juvenile delinquents, some as young as twelve years old. Most had their parents sent in gulag camps. Others were orphans, children that roamed the streets and perhaps stole a little food, or were simply homeless. They were arrested, interrogated, found guilty of espionage and sent here. I don’t know if this is about the paranoia of a single leader or the blindness of an ideology, but it is akin to a religious sacrifice, an offer to the God of the system. Individuals are brought into the fold and some are appointed with its bloodied officiations. Murder and torture are normalized and instrumentalized. Arendt spoke of the banality of evil with reference to Nazis in the camps. The truth is, the banality—or rather, ordinariness—of evil is rooted deep into the past. In the 13th century, Mongol soldiers rode into villages and executed peasants at random to show their chief how loyal they were. With time, the bureaucracy of torture gets more refined: the uninitiated are killed or die as a result of being overworked—the aim is to “re-forge” the rest, to reeducate them, as the gulag term went. In the meantime, they can be used for extracting gold or diamonds, build ghost-cities that will never appear on maps, like Magadan and Bratzk, or be recruited for war. Yesterday I was in Yoshkar-Ola in the Mari El Republic. Three miles away from the river promenade with its picturesque churches and houses, in the city’s penal colony, Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is supposed to have recruited inmates for the Ukrainian front. The machine’s cogs work always in circles: a man enters prison because he killed someone, then he is employed by the authority who convicted him to go and kill others in exchange for his freedom—in this case, after six months of service. The catch is, it may not be easy to last six months, if we believe the 10% rate of survival that appears on statistical evidence. But that isn’t worrisome: human resources are inexhaustible. They are more abundant than coal. They are white coal—that’s what the train guards called prisoners headed for the Vorkuta camp in the Arctic.
TO: Children who were detained in Raifa in the 30ies and 40ies would be quasi-centenaries today. I wonder if any survived, if their story was ever told, ever heard. On a map, I see that Sviyazhsk is a small round island used in turns as a juvenile labor camp, a prison, and a psychiatric hospital. Its shape brings back the claustrophobia of circles, rings, loops—the very fabric of chains—and so does your mentioning prisoners sent to the Ukrainian front. Arming inmates simultaneously undermines the “legitimacy” of war and the “redeeming” scope of custody—a double paradox, it might sound ironic, but is tragic instead. As a western traveler, what else do you perceive of the ongoing conflict? How does it intersect everyday life? Are there tangible signs? Are there echoes?
DL: Other than a “shrine” with photographs and flowers for dead soldiers and the occasional poster enticing men to join the army with the offer of a good salary, there isn’t much else. It’s business as usual, and the fancy cafes and restaurants in central Moscow are full of people having fun. No traces of war here, same as there’s no trace of the homeless in a city that is supposed to rank high for homelessness. Perhaps lower than LA, but (contrary to the centrality of Skid Row, which we discussed in our LARB conversation), in Moscow I saw only two homeless men in ten days. The façade does not bespeak the invisible realities underneath. People don’t openly talk about such matters, and—apart from an outing with prominent poet Y.G., who kindly asked me not to disclose his views—I only had a phone conversation with V., an English teacher from Uzbekistan, now resident in Russia. Her English had become a little rusty, but she craved to use it again. I started by asking her whether behind the seemingly relaxed atmosphere I encountered in Kazan, people still thought of the war. “No, they don’t,” she said. “Because this isn’t a war, you know. It’s a military operation.” I asked her if with that she meant that people in Kazan were far from the front and therefore not directly involved. “Yes,” she said, “that is exactly it.” “So,” I added, “are they not concerned”? “Oh, yes,” she said, “they are concerned because they don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but they have to live their lives day by day, don’t they, what else could they do? Christ has also taught us that.” Then, a few half-sentences were blurred by a bad connection, but when I thought I heard her say something about Stalin I followed the cue: “So, would you say that Stalin has been a positive figure”? “Of course,” she said, “without Stalin Russia would have collapsed. Back then, the country was full of traitors.” “And do you perceive the current administration as continuing Stalin’s good work?” “Yes, of course, you see, there are still a lot of traitors around.” The line was not getting better and it would have been hard to keep up with the conversation. “Thank you so much for helping me understand those matters,” I said. “Thank you!” she replied, “you made my day.”
