Andrey Korolev

Andrey Korolev ( _ru. Андрей Александович Королёв, 1944, Bern — 1999, Moscow) was a Russian philologist, PhD, a scholar in Indo-European and Oriental studies. His maine works concerned Celtic and Hittite and other languages of Asia Minor.

Born in a diplomatic family, he was a fluent speaker of English and German since he was a child. He worked at the department of Germanic and Celtic languages of the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences) and taught at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Through his great learning and talent for languages he became one of the first Russian scholars in two particularly difficult disciplines of Indo-European studies, dedicating himself to the Celtic and ancient languages of Asia Minor. He was also an expert in the broader questions of Indo-European linguistics and culture. His best known books are “Drevnejšie pamjatniki irlandskogo jazyka” (Древнейшие памятники ирландского языка, The oldest monuments of the Irish language) (Mosow, 1984, 2nd ed. 2003), containing the full corpus of the Ogham inscriptions, known at that time, and “Vvedenie v keltologiju” (Введение в кельтлогию, Introduction toCeltic studies (in collaboration with Viktor Kalygin)) (Moscow 1989; 2nd ed. 2006).

His modest position and the limited number of publications do not represent the true scope of Andrey A. Korolev, who was, in many scholars’ opinion, one of the best experts in Indo-European linguistics not only in in Russia, but in the world as well. The realization of his brilliant potential was impeded by the difficulties of life and his untimely death.