Agnia Vasilevna Desnickaya, Russian linguist, professor, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, albanologist, passed away in Russia. She was born in 1912. She studied German philology at the “A.I. Herzen” Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad (1931). She worked at the Pedagogical Institute, the University and the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg department) and held leadership positions. In the years 1976-1988, she headed the Department of comparative-historical Studies of Indo-European Languages and Areal Linguistics, where she found a place of interest in Balkan studies, especially in Albanian. In 1957, she founded the Albanian language and literature branch at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Leningrad, where she directed it until 1992. She visited Albania for the first time in 1946, but significant was her stay in 1957 for study purposes; in that year, the publication of her works dedicated to the Albanian language and literature began. She participated several times in scientific activities organized in Prishtina (1974–1986) and in the colloquium dedicated to Naim Frashëri (Tirana, 1990). She also prepared a generation of researchers, who continue the educational and scientific work on the Albanian language and literature. With her interest, a series of works were published on the problems of grammar and lexicon of the Balkan’s languages. Agnia Vasilevna Desnickaja dealt with a number of areas of Albanian studies: the history of the language, dialectology, lexical borrowings, morphological structure, literary language, and the language of folklore, with the Balkan connections of Albanian, Albanian literature, and the epic. She adhered to the opinion of the illyrian origin of Albanian. In addition to numerous articles, she published the synthesis work “Albanskij jazyk i ego dialekty” (1968), which was published and translated into Albanian “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 ). (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://www.derstandard.de/story/2000136529999/agnija-vasilievna-desnitskaja-die-russische-sprachwissenschafterin-und-albanologie
Graphic processing: AHCF
