Aleksey Gogua Q and A

       In Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Giorgio Comai has a Q & A with Aleksey Gogua, a writer in Sukhumi, a leading Abkhaz author.
       He's been around for a while (he was born 1932), and compares literary life before and after the Soviet collapse:

Back in Soviet Union times you used to write in Abkhaz, then your works were translated into Russian and published in Moscow. How has the situation changed today ?

There is local literature in Abkhaz, but having your works translated into Russian and reaching a wider audience is practically impossible now. Here, books are hardly ever printed in more than 500 copies, while during the Soviet Union, even one million copies could be printed...my books were published by some of the major publishing houses in Moscow, sometimes even in copies of 200 to 300 thousand.

       (The best-known Abkhaz author is Fazil Iskander -- though he wrote most of his works in Russian.)