Gjergj
Millosh Nikolla
(1911-1938)
Millosh Gjergj
Nikolla also known as Migjeni, was born in Shkodra. His father,
Gjergj Nikolla (1872-1924), came from an Orthodox family of Dibra
origin and owned a bar there. As a boy, he attended a Serbian
Orthodox elementary school in Shkodra and from 1923 to 1925 a
secondary school in Bar (Tivar) on the Montenegrin coast, where
his eldest sister, Lenka, had moved.
In the autumn
of 1925, when he was fourteen, he obtained a scholarship to attend
a secondary school in Monastir (Bitola) in southern Macedonia.
In Monastir he studied Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Greek, Latin
and French. Graduating from school in 1927, he entered the Orthodox
Seminary of St. John the Theologian, also in Monastir, where,
despite incipient health problems, he continued his training and
studies until June 1932. He read as many books as he could get
his hands on: Russian, Serbian and French literature in particular,
which were more to his tastes than theology. His years in Monastir
confronted him with the dichotomy of East and West, with the Slavic
soul of Holy Mother Russia and of the southern Slavs, which he
encountered in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky , Ivan Turgenev
, Lev Tolstoy , Nikolay Gogol and Maksim Gorky , and with socially
critical authors of the West from Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Friedrich
Schiller , Stendhal and Emile Zola to Upton Sinclair , Jack London
and Ben Traven.
On his return
to Shkodra in 1932, after failing to win a scholarship to study
in the ‘wonderful West,’ he decided to take up a teaching career
rather than join the priesthood for which he had been trained.
On 23 April 1933,
he was appointed teacher of Albanian at a school in the Serb village
of Vraka, seven kilometres from Shkodra. It was during this period
that he also began writing prose sketches and verse which reflect
the life and anguish of an intellectual in what certainly was
and has remained the most backward region of Europe.
In May 1934 his
first short prose piece, Sokrat i vuejtun a po derr i kënaqun
(Suffering Socrates or the satisfied pig), was published in
the periodical Illyria, under his new pen name Migjeni,
an acronym of Millosh Gjergj Nikolla. Soon though, in the summer
of 1935, the twenty-three-year-old Migjeni fell seriously ill
with tuberculosis, which he had contracted earlier. He journeyed
to Athens in July of that year in hope of obtaining treatment
for the disease which was endemic on the marshy coastal plains
of Albania at the time, but returned to Shkodra a month later
with no improvement in his condition.
In the autumn
of 1935, he transferred for a year to a school in Shkodra itself
and, again in the periodical Illyria, began publishing his first
epoch-making poems. In a letter of 12 January 1936 written to
translator Skënder Luarasi (1900-1982) in Tirana, Migjeni announced,
"I am about to send my songs to press. Since, while you were
here, you promised that you would take charge of speaking to some
publisher, ‘Gutemberg’ for instance, I would now like to remind
you of this promise, informing you that I am ready." Two days
later, Migjeni received the transfer he had earlier requested
to the mountain village of Puka and on 18 April 1936 began his
activities as the headmaster of the run-down school there. The
clear mountain air did him some good, but the poverty and misery
of the mountain tribes in and around Puka were even more overwhelming
than that which he had experienced among the inhabitants of the
coastal plain. Many of the children came to school barefoot and
hungry, and teaching was interrupted for long periods of time
because of outbreaks of contagious diseases, such as measles and
mumps. After eighteen hard months in the mountains, the consumptive
poet was obliged to put an end to his career as a teacher and
as a writer, and to seek medical treatment in Turin in northern
Italy where his sister Ollga was studying mathematics. He set
out from Shkodra on 20 December 1937 and arrived in Turin before
Christmas day. There he had hoped, after recovery, to register
and study at the Faculty of Arts. The breakthrough in the treatment
of tuberculosis, however, was to come a decade too late for Migjeni.
After five months at San Luigi sanatorium near Turin, Migjeni
was transferred to the Waldensian hospital in Torre Pellice where
he died on 26 August 1938.
His demise at
the age of twenty-six was a tragic loss for modern Albanian letters.
Migjeni made a promising start as a prose writer. He is the author
of about twenty-four short prose sketches which he published in
periodicals for the most part between the spring of 1933 and the
spring of 1938. Ranging from one to five pages in length, these
pieces are too short to constitute tales or short stories. Although
he approached new themes with unprecedented cynicism and force,
his sketches cannot all be considered great works of art from
a literary point of view. It is thus far more as a poet that Migjeni
made his mark on Albanian literature and culture, though he did
so posthumously. He possessed all the prerequisites for being
a great poet. He had an inquisitive mind, a depressive pessimistic
nature and a repressed sexuality. Though his verse production
was no more voluminous than his prose, his success in the field
of poetry was no less than spectacular in Albania at the time.
Migjeni’s only
volume of verse, Vargjet e lira, Tirana 1944 (Free verses),
was composed over a three-year period from 1933 to 1935. A first
edition of this slender and yet revolutionary collection, a total
of thirty-five poems, was printed by the Gutemberg Press
in Tirana in 1936 but was immediately banned by the authorities
and never circulated. The second edition of 1944, undertaken by
scholar Kostaç Cipo (1892-1952) and the poet’s sister Ollga, was
more successful. It nonetheless omitted two poems, Parathanja
e parathanjeve (Preface of prefaces) and Blasfemi
(Blasphemy), which the publisher, Ismail Mal’Osmani, felt
might offend the Church.
The 1944 edition
did, however, include eight other poems composed after the first
edition had already gone to press. The main theme of ‘Free
verses,’ as with Migjeni’s prose, is misery and suffering.
It is a poetry of acute social awareness and despair. Previous
generations of poets had sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains
and the sacred traditions of the nation, whereas Migjeni now opened
his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling level
of misery, disease and poverty he discovered all around him. He
was a poet of despair who saw no way out, who cherished no hope
that anything but death could put an end to suffering. "I suffer
with the child whose father cannot buy him a toy. I suffer with
the young man who burns with unslaked sexual desire. I suffer
with the middle-aged man drowning in the apathy of life. I suffer
with the old man who trembles at the prospect of death. I suffer
with the peasant struggling with the soil. I suffer with the worker
crushed by iron. I suffer with the sick suffering from all the
diseases of the world... I suffer with man." Typical of the
suffering and of the futility of human endeavour for Migjeni is
Rezignata (Resignation), a poem in the longest cycle of
the collection, Kangët e mjerimit (Songs of poverty). Here
the poet paints a grim portrait of our earthly existence: sombre
nights, tears, smoke, thorns and mud. Rarely does a breath of
fresh air or a vision of nature seep through the gloom. When nature
does occur in the verse of Migjeni, then of course it is autumn.
If there is no hope, there are at least suffocated desires and
wishes.
Some poems, such
as Të birtë e shekullit të ri (The sons of the new age),
Zgjimi (Awakening), Kanga e rinisë ( The song of youth)
and Kanga e të burgosunit (The prisoner’s song), are assertively
declamatory in a left-wing revolutionary manner. Here we discover
Migjeni as a precursor of socialist verse or rather, in fact,
as the zenith of genuine socialist verse in Albanian letters,
long before the so-called liberation and socialist period from
1944 to 1990. Migjeni was, nonetheless, not a socialist or revolutionary
poet in the political sense, despite the indignation and the occasional
clenched fist he shows us. For this, he lacked the optimism as
well as any sense of political commitment and activity. He was
a product of the thirties, an age in which Albanian intellectuals,
including Migjeni, were particularly fascinated by the West and
in which, in Western Europe itself, the rival ideologies of communism
and fascism were colliding for the first time in the Spanish Civil
War. Migjeni was not entirely uninfluenced by the nascent philosophy
of the right either. In Të lindet njeriu (May the man be
born) and particularly, in the Nietzschean dithyramb Trajtat
e Mbinjeriut (The shape of the Superman), a strangled, crushed
will transforms itself into "ardent desire for a new genius,"
for the Superman to come. To a Trotskyite friend, André Stefi,
who had warned him that the communists would not forgive for such
poems, Migjeni replied, "My work has a combative character,
but for practical reasons, and taking into account our particular
conditions, I must manoeuvre in disguise. I cannot explain these
things to the [communist] groups, they must understand them for
themselves. The publication of my works is dictated by the necessities
of the social situation through which we are passing. As for myself,
I consider my work to be a contribution to the union of the groups.
André, my work will be achieved if I manage to live a little longer."
Part of the ‘establishment’
which he felt was oblivious to and indeed responsible for the
sufferings of humanity was the Church. Migjeni’s religious education
and his training for the Orthodox priesthood seem to have been
entirely counterproductive, for he cherished neither an attachment
to religion nor any particularly fond sentiments for the organized
Church. God for Migjeni was a giant with granite fists crushing
the will of man. Evidence of the repulsion he felt towards god
and the Church are to be found in the two poems missing from the
1944 edition, Parathania e parathanieve (Preface of prefaces)
with its cry of desperation "God! Where are you?", and
Blasfemi (Blasphemy). In Kanga skandaloze (Scandalous song),
Migjeni expresses a morbid attraction to a pale nun and at the
same time his defiance and rejection of her world. This poem is
one which helps throw some light not only on Migjeni’s attitude
to religion but also on one of the more fascinating and least
studied aspects in the life of the poet, his repressed heterosexuality.
Eroticism has
certainly never been a prominent feature of Albanian literature
at any period and one would be hard pressed to name any Albanian
author who has expressed his intimate impulses and desires in
verse or prose. Migjeni comes closest, though in an unwitting
manner. It is generally assumed that the poet remained a virgin
until his untimely death at the age of twenty-six. His verse and
his prose abound with the figures of women, many of them unhappy
prostitutes, for whom Migjeni betrays both pity and an open sexual
interest. It is the tearful eyes and the red lips which catch
his attention; the rest of the body is rarely described. For Migjeni,
sex too means suffering. Passion and rapturous desire are ubiquitous
in his verse, but equally present is the spectre of physical intimacy
portrayed in terms of disgust and sorrow. It is but one of the
many bestial faces of misery described in the 105-line Poema
e mjerimit (Poem of poverty).
Though he did
not publish a single book during his lifetime, Migjeni’s works,
which circulated privately and in the press of the period, were
an immediate success. Migjeni paved the way for a modern literature
in Albania. This literature was, however, soon to be nipped in
the bud. Indeed the very year of the publication of ‘Free Verse’
saw the victory of Stalinism in Albania and the proclamation of
the People’s Republic. Many have speculated as to what contribution
Migjeni might have made to Albanian letters had he managed to
live longer. The question remains highly hypothetical, for this
individualist voice of genuine social protest would no doubt have
suffered the same fate as most Albanian writers of talent in the
late forties, i.e. internment, imprisonment or execution. His
early demise has at least preserved the writer for us undefiled.
The fact that Migjeni did perish so young makes it difficult to
provide a critical assessment of his work. Though generally admired,
Migjeni is not without critics. Some have been disappointed by
his prose, nor is the range of his verse sufficient to allow us
to acclaim him as a universal poet.
Albanian-American
scholar Arshi Pipa (1920-1997) has questioned his very mastery
of the Albanian language, asserting: "Born Albanian to a family
of Slavic origin, then educated in a Slavic cultural milieu, he
made contact again with Albania and the Albanian language and
culture as an adult. The language he spoke at home was Serbo-Croatian,
and at the seminary he learned Russian. He did not know Albanian
well. His texts swarm with spelling mistakes, even elementary
ones, and his syntax is far from being typically Albanian. What
is true of Italo Svevo’s Italian is even truer of Migjeni’s Albanian."
Post-war Stalinist critics in Albania rather superficially proclaimed
Migjeni as the precursor of socialist realism though they were
unable to deal with many aspects of his life and work, in particular
his Schopenhauerian pessimism, his sympathies with the West, his
repressed sexuality, and the Nietzschean element in Trajtat e
Mbinjeriut (The shape of the Superman), a poem conveniently left
out of some post-war editions of his verse. While such critics
have delighted in viewing Migjeni as a product of ‘pre-liberation’
Zogist Albania, it has become painfully evident that the poet’s
‘Songs unsung,’ after half a century of communist dictatorship
in Albania, are now more compelling than ever