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.