Andrey Zaliznyak was born in
Moscow on 29 April 1935 to Anatoly Andreyevich Zaliznyak, an engineer, and Tatiana Konstantinovna Krapivina, a chemist. During
World War II, the family was in evacuation. There, Andrey joined a German language class, but his teacher called him incapable of learning languages; his mother was advised not to waste time in teaching him German. Instead of repeating phrases after the teacher, Zaliznyak composed a table of German words for six colors. After the war, Zaliznyak was sent to relatives to
Pruzhany in
Western Belarus; his relatives had a lot of
Polish-language books, and he met a priest who knew
Latin. He became fascinated by languages and bought multiple
grammar books. Several years later, he had a head injury while playing
football and spent four days unconscious; bedridden, he spent two weeks with a French grammar book. As a teenager he learned Polish, Latin, English, Italian, and Spanish to a various degree of proficiency. In 1951 Zaliznyak participated in the first Language and Literature Olympiad organized by the philology department at
Moscow State University, where he met his future wife,
Yelena Paducheva, for the first time. He took first place, and she took third; in the following year, the two came joint first. Paducheva later became his classmate at MSU. Zaliznyak began studying linguistics at MSU in 1952, focusing on English and Swedish. He attended courses by the Indologist
Louis Renou and the Iranist
Émile Benveniste, and followed both
Michel Lejeune's lectures on Mycenean linguistics and the course of
André Martinet, whose book ('Economy of Phonetic Changes') he later translated into Russian. In 1958, he graduated from the Department of Romance and Germanic Languages at Moscow State University. His advisor was
Vyacheslav Ivanov; in the same year, Ivanov was fired from the university for his support of
Boris Pasternak and connections with
Roman Jakobson. In 1960, Zaliznyak was invited to the
Institute for Slavic Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to
Samuil Bernstein's group, and was assigned to study "Slavic–Iranian
language contacts". He soon became interested in other topics, but published two papers on it before switching to Russian language studies. Zaliznyak defended his candidate thesis at the Institute for Slavic Studies in 1965 on "Classification and synthesis of nominal paradigms of the modern Russian language", for which he was immediately awarded the
Doctor of Philological Sciences degree, instead of the
Candidate degree. From 1960 until his death, Zaliznyak worked at the institute as a chief researcher in the department of typology and comparative linguistics. He simultaneously taught at Moscow State University's Philological Faculty, becoming a professor in 1973. In 1988, Zaliznyak started to lecture in Europe. He also traveled by trains, as his old head injury made it impossible for him to travel by plane. He lectured internationally at the University of Provence (1989–1990), University of Paris (1991), and University of Geneva (1992–2000). In 1987, he became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1997, a full academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2001, he became a member of Gottingen Academy of Science. ==Major contributions==