Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering: Facing Nonforward Distributions

Applications of perturbative QCD to deeply virtual Compton scattering process require a generalization of usual parton distributions for the case when long-distance information is accumulated in nonforward matrix elements of quark and gluon operators. We discuss two types of functions parametrizing such matrix elements: double distributions F(x,y;t) and nonforward distribution functions \cal F_\zeta (X;t) and also their relation to usual parton densities f(x).