Nino's father permits her to marry in a year's time, when she has finished school; his permission is apparently partly thanks to the persuasion of Ali's friend Melek Nacharyan, a (Christian) Armenian.

[5] Variety called it a "Magnificent historical whodunit, wherein crumbling photographs, yellowing documents, and forgotten reels of 35 mm film are invested with tremendous evocative power.

Her "soundtrack" to the novel used "both Georgian and Azerbaijani traditional music and works by Azer Rzaev, Uzeyir Hajibeyli, Vagif Mustafazadeh, Fritz Kreisler and, of course, Kara Karayev, amongst many others."

(This Italian edition was brought to press by Dr. Ahmed Giamil Vacca-Mazzara (né Bello Vacca), who claimed himself to be Kurban Said and denied that Essad Bey was a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum.[19]).

"[25] Another testimonial is by Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels in his foreword to a 1973 Swiss edition of the second Kurban Said novel, The Girl From the Golden Horn.

[26] Identifying "Kurban Said" with the man he would have known in the 1930s as Nussimbaum/Bey, the baron writes: "As a young man I founded the 'Orient-Bund' for Afro-Asian students in Vienna and through it I became friends with the quietly observing Azerbaijani Kurban Said.... My way brought me shortly after that to India, from where I returned to Europe for the first time in 1954 and immediately went to visit the traditional Muslim grave of my then apparently forgotten friend which stood outside the wall of the cemetery in Positano.

"[28] Tom Reiss has argued—first in a 1999 article in The New Yorker and then at greater length in his 2005 biography of Nussimbaum, The Orientalist—that it is "almost certain that Kurban Said was a cover for him so that he could continue to receive royalties from his work.

"[31] This theory is supported by Bertha Pauli's 1971 letter to the New York Times, in which she wrote that a reason Nussimbaum may have used the pseudonym for his work in this period was that "as 'Kurban Said' it could still be sold in the German market."

These were the books Stalin and Ali and Nino," adding that "The heroes of the novel simply come to me demanding, 'Give us shape' — 'we also possess certain characteristics that you've left out and we want to travel, among other things.'

"[35] (Betty Blair has interpreted this statement as an "admission" that Nussimbaum had "gained access to the original manuscripts" already written by someone else, Yusif Vavir Chamanzaminli, and had "embellished them.

In The Orientalist Reiss cites the testimony of Alexandre Brailowski (aka Alex Brailow), a schoolmate of Lev Nussimbaum's at the Russian gymnasium in Charlottenburg, Berlin.

Brailow wrote: "The whole love affair, including the elopement of Nino and the subsequent pursuit and killing of Nachararyan, is as much of a wish-fulfillment as is the autobiography of Ali whose adolescence and youth are a curious mixture of Essad's own and of what he would have liked them to be.

"[41] Reiss asserts that "though clearly juvenilia," Nussimbaum's unpublished early stories "had an irony that was instantly recognizable as the raw material of Ali and Nino and so many of the Caucasian books Lev would write.

demonstrates that portions of Ali and Nino were "stolen" from the 1926 novel The Snake's Skin (Das Schlangenhemd) by Georgian author Grigol Robakidze.

Fikret Vezirov has proffered the claim that Chamanzaminli had to hide his identity behind the name Kurban Said so that he would not be identified with the anti-Bolshevik views contained in Ali and Nino.

Vezirov cited the fact that his father had traveled to Iran, Tbilisi, Kislovodsk, and Daghestan (all visited by the novel's characters) as another self-evident link.

[citation needed] They have offered two kinds of criticism: one is a political rejection of the latent exclusionary nationalism they feel has motivated the campaign for establishing Chamanzaminli as the novel's "core author".

"[48] Renowned Azerbaijani poet, mathematician, and founder of Baku's Khazar University Hamlet Isakhanli oglu Isayev has also spoken out against nationalistic motivations in the campaign for Chamanzaminli's authorship.

The two "recognized" the novel's descriptions of "familiar streets, squares, mansions" of Baku as well as "the names of some of the Oil Baron families mentioned in the book."

Blair asserts that a passage in Chamanzaminli's writing represents "a paper trail" demonstrating that Chamanzamanli "spent considerable time in three libraries in old Istanbul while living there (1920–1923) after his appointment as Azerbaijan's ambassador was terminated with the takeover of Bolshevik government in Baku."

Blair's "paper trail" consists of the following statement from Chamanzaminli's writings: "We gave some documents to the Qatanov [Katanov] Library of Suleymaniye in Istanbul.

[62] Blair offers the two hypothetical scenarios, rather than a documentary paper trail, as a theory of how something conjecturally written by Chamanzaminli would have been published in an altered form as Ali and Nino in 1937.

[56] Blair's "core author" argument is based on a list of 101 correlations found by comparing aspects of Chamanzaminli's and writings as well as evidence about his life experiences and his works including his diaries, articles, short stories and novels.

[63] Blair asserts that in the writings that Nussimbaum published as Essad Bey, he shows himself to have a negative attitude toward Azerbaijan, that when he left he was "thrilled to have closed that chapter of his life."

The final paragraphs in Essad Bey's work Blood and Oil in the Orient describe him and his father stepping off the steamship and heading to the center of Constantinople [now Istanbul] to the international Grand Hotel.

"[65] The working title of Ali and Nino, according to the 1937 contract between Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmerschof and the Tal publishing company, was The Dying Orient.

[66] Blair relies on an accumulation of evidence employed to suggest that Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote as Essad Bey, could not have written Ali and Nino by himself.

[67] Azerbaijani journalist Nikki Kazimova has reported that "most of the evidence of Chemenzeminli's authorship is suggestive rather than factual, and plenty of AI's arguments are a 'proof by contradiction.

'"[48] Some scholars of Azerbaijani literature and culture, after being exposed to Blair's arguments, continue to express doubts about the possibility that Chamanzaminli is the novel's author.

[72] In the 2004 film Alias Kurban Said, the Baroness Mireille Ehrenfels-Abeille said that Elfriede Ehrenfels "never" said "a single word" regarding Ali and Nino when she knew her after returning to Austria in 1960 from a long stay in India, explaining that "it was a different world, that had come to an end.