MIGJENI
BIOGRAPHY
With Migjeni (1911-1938), contemporary Albanian poetry begins
its course. Migjeni, pen name of Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, was
born in Shkodra. His father, Gjergj Nikolla (1872-1924), came
from an Orthodox family of Dibran 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. This ethnically diverse town, not far
from the Greek border, must have held a certain fascination for
the young lad from distant Shkodra, since he came into contact
there not only with Albanians from different parts of the Balkans,
but also with Macedonian, Serb, Aromunian, Turkish and Greek
students. Being of Slavic origin himself, he was not confined
by narrow-minded nationalist perspectives and was to become one
of the very few Albanian authors to bridge the cultural chasm
separating the Albanians and Serbs. 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 verse), 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 verse,’ 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 rinis (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. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Classical
Authors (19th - early 20th centuries)
