Dmitrii Gulia

Dmitrii Gulia (born Feb. 21, 1874, Varcha, Abkhazia—died April 7, 1960, Gulripsh, Abkhazia, Georgia, U.S.S.R. [now Abkhazia, Georgia]) was an Abkhazian writer, educator, and cultural pioneer, commonly considered the founder of Abkhazian literature.

From an early age, Gulia was active in promoting the Abkhaz language, and in 1892 he created a revised Abkhaz script and primer with K.D. Machavariani. Gulia was one of the first Abkhazians to document the tales and legends of local storytellers, and his publication of Abkhazian Proverbs, Riddles, and Tongue-Twisters in 1907 and Poems and Chastushki in 1912 marked the beginning of secular literature written in Abkhaz. These were followed in 1913 with an epic poem, The Correspondence of a Young Man and His Girl. Gulia served as editor of the first Abkhaz-language newspaper, Apsny (founded 1919), which published his Under a Foreign Sky, the first original prose work in Abkhaz.

After the Bolshevik takeover of Abkhazia in 1921, Gulia turned his attention to drama, founding the first Abkhazian amateur theatre company, and then to teaching Abkhaz at Tbilisi State University in Georgia (1924–26). He published Poems, Satires, and Songs in 1923 and the first volume of his History of Abkhazia in 1925.

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Gulia escaped the worst of the Soviet repressions in the 1930s. He was awarded the Soviet distinction of People’s Poet in 1937, and during the late 1930s he worked on the novel Kamachych, which was published in 1940. He also translated a large number of literary classics into Abkhaz. He wrote his first play, Ghosts, in 1946. From the latter half of the 1940s until his death, Gulia protested vociferously against measures that threatened Abkhaz language and cultural development. His protests are reflected in the themes of his poetry, much of which is imbued with a strong sense of history.