Migjeni (Millosh Gjergj Nikolla), poet and prose writer, was born in Shkodër. He was born in Shkodër in 1911. He received his first lessons in his hometown. He finished the city school in Tivar, in the years 1929-1933 he attended the Theological Seminary of Manastir. After returning to his homeland, he worked as a primary school teacher in Vrakë (Shkodër) and Pukë. At that time, his lung disease worsened, which had appeared since he was in the seminary. At the end of 1937, he went to Italy to be cured and to pursue higher studies in literature. He was hospitalized in a sanatorium near Turin, where he passed away in 1938. Migjeni began to publish his first creations, poems and sketches, in the magazines “Illyrija“, “Bota e re” (“New World”) etc. The complete work of Migjen was published by Skënder Luaras, in 1957, under the auspices of the League of Writers and Artists. Afterwards, his work was published several times in Tirana and Prishtina. Migjen’s poetry brought a new issue to Albanian literature, the life of the poor layers of Albanian society, the theme of misery and its moral consequences, the artistic experience of the necessity of change and the vision of another, better and more peaceful and righteous world. He outlined the features of a humanism that discarded myths, cults and all kinds of irrational and sentimental attitudes. Migjen’s narrative prose, although not published during his lifetime, was a direct expression of the need felt by the literary process of the time to abandon romantic-sentimental visions and outdated idols. Materialist in his convictions, Migjeni had come to understand that the psyche of the individual was determined by his economic condition, and, precisely for this reason, he had to be described in his dependence on the reality of wild and complicated social relations. Migjen’s work was challenging in every way; it was an expression of the painful concerns of the Albanian spiritual life that invited to imagine a human society in which the individual, known and understood recently, would be fully realized in all its existential complications. Migjeni has been and remains among the most read writers of Albanian literature. His creativity played a great reforming and innovative role in Albanian literature; it was the most marked appearance of its encounter with the modern developments of European literature. This is one of the reasons that it has been translated into several languages. He died in a sanatorium near Turin (Italy) in 1938. (In the photo: Milosh Gjergj Nikola)
Text: Albanian encyclopedic dictionary – Vol. 2 , Academy of Sciences of Albania, “Kristalina-KH”, Tirana, 2008, page 1708-1710.
Photo: © Albanian Telegraphic Agency
Graphic processing: AHCF
