PALH 

CHACHKHALIA DENIS KIRSHALOVICH

21.08.1950


He is an Abkhazian writer, historian, and translator.
He was born on 21 August 1950 in Tkuarchal in the family of Abkhazian poet Kirshal Chachkhalia. 
In 1961, the Chachkhalia family moved to the city of Sukhum.
He graduated from the Abkhaz boarding secondary school in Sukhum in 1968.
Between 1968 and 1973 he studied at the Translation Department of the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.
From 1970 he began to publish.
In 1973, he returned to Sukhum, where he took a position as a correspondent for the newspaper «Sovetskaya Abkhazia».
Since the early 1980s, he has published prose works, dramas, and poems. Some of the writer's stories have been translated into foreign languages.
He has been a member of the USSR Union of Writers since 1984.
In 1984-1990, he taught at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and led a creative workshop on translating Abkhazian poetry and prose.
In the 1990s, he took the position of Director of the Literary Fund of the Union of Writers of Abkhazia.
In 2020 he was awarded the State Prize of the Republic of Abkhazia named after Dmitry Gulia. Dmitry Gulia.
In 2021, he was awarded the title of «Honorary Doctor of Science of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia».
He is currently the Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Union of Writers of Abkhazia for Foreign Relations.
He translated into Abkhazian works by S. Yesenin, A. Pushkin, A. Blok, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Akhmatova; from German poetry: Heine, Goethe, Schiller, as well as Russian translations of poems by Abkhaz poets D. Gulia, I. Kogonia, B. Shinkub, K. Chachkhalia, T. Ajba, A. Adjinjala, B. Gurgulia, G. Alamia, and R. Smyr.

Works by the author:
  • «Beyond the horizon» (collection of poetry), Sukhum, 1976
  • «Two heavens» (collection of poetry), Sukhum, 1982
  • «Degree of kinship» (collection of poetry), 1985
  • «The ford of a lonely alder tree. Stories and drama», 1988
  • «Smoketree», story, 1988
  • «Abkhazian lira» (selected poetry and translations), foreword by S. Solozhenkina.
  • «Abkhazian Orthodox Church. Chronicle. Additions», Moscow, 1997
  • «Chronicle of the Abkhazian kings», Moscow, 2000
  • «Abkhazian school of Byzantine architecture», Sukhum, 2012
  • «Three-altar composition of the temples of medieval Abkhazia and its influence on the architectonics of the monuments of Alania, Rus and Trebizond», Moscow, 2016.
  • «Poetry of Reflections» (translations), Moscow, «AKVA-Abaza», 2019