page_title: Migjeni
section_title: Teaching, publishing and deteriorating health
hierarchical_section_title: Migjeni / Career / Teaching, publishing and deteriorating health
caption_attribution_description: Millosh Gjergj Nikolla
context_page_description: Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, commonly known by the acronym pen name Migjeni, was an Albanian poet and writer, considered as one of the most important of the 20th century. After his death, he was recognized as one of the influential writers of interwar Albanian literature.
  Migjeni is considered to have shifted from revolutionary romanticism to critical realism during his lifetime. He wrote about the poverty of the years he lived in, with writings such as "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread", "The Killing Beauty", "Forbidden Apple", "The Corn Legend", "Would You Like Some Charcoal?" etc., severely conveyed the indifference of the wealthy classes to the suffering of the people.
  The proliferation of his creativity gained a special momentum after World War II, when the communist regime took over the full publication of works, which in the 1930s had been partially unpublished.
context_section_description: On 23 April 1933, he was appointed teacher at a school in the village of Vrakë or Vraka, seven kilometers from Shkokër, until 1934 when the school closed. It was during this period that he also began writing prose sketches and verses.
  In May 1934 his first short prose piece, Sokrat i vuejtun apo derr i kënaqun (Suffering Socrates or a 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, Greece 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 people 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 because of outbreaks of contagious diseases, such as measles and mumps. After eighteen difficult 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 the modern Albanian letters.
  The author had chosen the nom-de-plume Mi-Gje-Ni, an acronym formed by the first two letters each of his first name, patronymic and last name.
caption: Migjeni on an Albanian stamp from 1961.
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