Desnitsky wrote about his move in two messages. In the first, he spoke of emigration as the loss of a familiar way of life: “Emigration is about the fact that you take nothing with you. Not the cozy apartment where you planned to grow old, not the job where you spent more than half your life, not even the smell of wet leaves on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard after a thunderstorm.” In the same message he noted: “And you believe that this is not forever.”
In the second message, he said, he did not explain what exactly prompted his decision: “…And you, I suppose, will ne-ver know which events and signals became the reasons for this decision right now. Simply because each of us has his own life.”
Academic Career
Andrei Sergeyevich Desnitsky was born in 1968. In 1992 he graduated from the Classics Department of the Faculty of Philology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and from 1992 to 1993 he studied biblical translation at the Free University of Amsterdam. Since 1994 he has worked at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1997, at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under the supervision of Candidate of Philological Sciences M. G. Seleznyov, he defended his candidate’s dissertation on the translation technique of the Septuagint. In 2010 he defended his doctoral dissertation there on the nature and functions of parallelism in biblical texts.
Translations and Public Lectures
Since 1999, Desnitsky has also worked at the Institute for Bible Translation, where he advises translators of the Holy Scriptures into the languages of the former Soviet Union. He has published several books and more than 50 scholarly articles, not counting essays, and gives public lectures on the Bible.
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