Millosh Gjergj Nikolla

Millosh Gjergj Nikolla (aka Migjeni) (1911 - 1938) was born in Shkoder[?], Albania on October 13 to a family of origin from Diber[?]. Migjeni attended elementary school in Shkoder at the Serbian-language school there and later at St. John's Orthodox Seminary in Bitola (Manastir), Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. There he studied Russian, French Greek and Latin and read literature written on those languages. On his return to Albania, he gave up his intended career as a priest to become a school teacher in Vrake[?], a Serb village a few miles from Shkoder. He began writing verse and prose sketches in Albanian. Having contracted tuberculosis, which was then endemic in Albania, he went for treatment to Turin in northern Italy where his sister Olga[?] was studying mathematics. After some time in a sanatorium there, he was transferred to the Waldensian Hospital[?] in Torre Pellice[?] where he died on August 26, 1938 at the age of twenty-six.

His slender volume of verse (thirty-five poems) entitled Vargjet e Lira[?] (Free Verse) was printed by Gutenberg Press[?] in Tirane in 1936, but was banned by the authorities. The second edition, published in 1944, was missing two old poems Parathanja e parathanjeve (Preface of prefaces) and Blasfemi (Blasphemy) that were deemed offensive, but it did include eight new ones. The main theme of Migjeni was misery and suffering, a reflection of the life he saw and lived.