Gurra, Milto Sotir

Milto Sotir-Gurra ( Alb. Milto Sotir Gurra ; May 16, 1884 , village of Maryan (now Korcha , Albania ) - 1972 , Tirana ) - Albanian prose writer, translator and publicist.

Milto Sotir Gurra
Date of Birth	May 16, 1884 ( 1884-05-16 )
Place of Birth	Marjan, Ottoman Empire
Date of death	1972 ( 1972 )
Place of death	Tirana , Albania
Citizenship	Albania
Occupation	prose writer , translator
Language of Works

In his youth, he lived for a long time in the Russian Empire , was one of the leaders of the patriotic movement among the Albanian emigrants of Odessa . It was here that he wrote a significant part of his short stories and journalistic works. Then he lived in America , Istanbul , Sofia . Finally returned to Albania in 1921.

He took part in the June uprising of 1924, when the peasants seized the capital of the country Tirana , overthrew the government of Ahmet Zog and brought to power the democratic bishop Theophanes (Noli) . Sotir-Gurra took the overthrow of the government of Noli and the return of Zog to power as a personal defeat and moved away from politics.

After that, he was engaged mainly in literary translation. He owns one of the first translations of Gogol's novels into the Albanian language . He also translated the works of Pushkin , Turgenev , Chekhov , Gorky .

Sotira-Gurra’s own works are mainly small stories, ethnographically colored, with a simple plot. They are devoid of didacticity, and social accents hidden in the text. The author does not draw conclusions (both social and psychological), but leads the reader to them (“Christmas”, “New Year's Gift”, “Warm Up”, in these works critics see a certain influence of Chekhov). He pays a lot of attention to descriptions of peasant customs, holidays, clothes, etc. Regarding the stories, one can feel the influence of romanticism (“Rage of Jealousy”, “Mother”, “Matilda's Love”), the third are closer to essays and depict paintings of the liberation struggle of the early XX century .