According to Ruhr University Bochum, Desnitsky was born in Moscow and spent most of his life there. He worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOS RAS) in the Department of the Ancient East, and also as a consultant for the Institute for Bible Translation, which translates the Holy Scriptures into the languages of the former Soviet Union.
Academic Career
In 1997, Desnitsky defended his dissertation at the IOS RAS on the translation technique of the Septuagint in the context of Hellenistic poetics, in which he analyzed the songs and blessings in the Pentateuch. Further research was devoted to the structure of biblical texts; in 2010 this was followed by a habilitation with a work on the nature and function of biblical parallelism. In 2015, for his significant scholarly contribution, he was appointed professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The university notes that Desnitsky recently published his own translation of the New Testament into Russian.
Departure from Russia and Work in Germany
Due to his critical stance on the war in Ukraine, Andrey Desnitsky left Russia in the autumn of 2022. Since then, he and his wife have lived in various countries, including Lithuania, Montenegro, and Germany. In the first half of 2024, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Münster, after which he accepted an invitation from CERES.
Project on Metaphors
At CERES, Desnitsky is primarily engaged in preparing an application for DFG funding. In his research, he studies how the social metaphors of the New Testament are conveyed in translations against the background of various cultural and religious contexts. For his analysis, he draws on the Russian, Crimean Tatar, and Azerbaijani translations of the Bible, which he has studied in detail. Since comparable studies in the specialized literature are still almost nonexistent, the university assesses his project as an important contribution to both philology and religious studies.
1
