Agnia Vasilevna Desnickaya, a Russian linguist, professor, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and Albanianologist, was born in 1931. She completed her higher studies in German philology at the “AI Hercen” Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. Desnickaya worked at the Pedagogical Institute, the University, and the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg branch), where she held several leadership positions. From 1976 to 1988, she headed the Department of Comparative-Historical Studies of Indo-European Languages and Areal Linguistics, focusing on Balkan studies, particularly Albanian. In 1957, she founded the branch of Albanian language and literature at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Leningrad and directed it until 1992. She visited Albania for the first time in 1946, but her research trip in 1957 was significant; that same year marked the beginning of her publications dedicated to the language of Albanian literature. Desnickaya participated several times in scientific activities organized in Prishtina (1974–1986) and in the colloquium dedicated to Naim Frashëri in Tirana in 1990. She also trained a generation of researchers who continued educational and scientific work on the Albanian language and literature. Her research contributed to various studies on the grammar and lexicon of Balkan languages. Agnia Vasilevna Desnickaya explored several areas within Albanian studies, including the history of the language, dialectology, lexical borrowings, morphological structure, literary language, folklore language, and the Balkan connections of Albanian. She supported the theory of the Illyrian origin of the Albanian language. Alongside numerous articles, she published the synthesis work “Albanskij jazyk i ego dialekty” (1968), which was translated into Albanian as “Gjuha Shqipe dhe dialektet e saj” (“The Albanian Language and Its Dialects”) (Prishtina, 1972) and the collection “Letërsia shqipe dhe gjuha shqipe” (“Albanian Literature and the Albanian Language”) (1987). She passed away in Russia in 1992. (In the photo: Agnia Vasilevna Desnickaya)
Text: Albanian encyclopedic dictionary – Vol. 1, Academy of Sciences of Albania, “Kristalina-KH”, Tirana, 2008, page 453.
Photo: © https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Десницкая,_Агния_Васильевна
Graphic processing: AHCF
