manuscript "would have" passed from Chamanzaminli's hands into Tal's possession at that moment. Blair purports that this stop in Vienna is possible because Chamanzaminli "would have" taken the Orient Express (which passed through Vienna) because it was "the most famous train route of its day." Blair offers a further elaboration of this Vienna scenario based on a statement attributed to the original publisher's wife, Lucy Tal, which Tal vociferously denied ever making. Blair reports that the preface to the 1971 Turkish edition asserts that the author behind Kurban Said is Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli. The translator, Semih Yazichioghlu, writes in this preface that two Azerbaijanis living in the United States – Mustafa Turkekul (who has said that he studied with Chamanzaminli in the 1930s) and Yusuf Gahraman (a former teacher and radiologist) read the book when the first English translation came out in 1970. 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." They then contacted Random House, the publisher, "hoping to learn more about the identity of Kurban Said." They assert in this foreword that Lucy Tal (the wife of E.P. Tal, the novel's original Viennese publisher) had replied: "It was in the 1920s (Mrs. Tal couldn't remember exactly what year it was). A handsome young man came to the publishing house and spoke with my husband [E.P. Tal] at length and then left a pile of manuscripts. I still don't know what they talked about as my husband never told me... My husband went on to publish these manuscripts in 1937." Andreas Tietze translated this preface from Turkish into English on May 31, 1973, for Tal's lawyer F.A.G. Schoenberg on May 31, 1973. Tietze, perhaps the first to give credence to the Chamanzaminli theory, commented that "the evidence, although not conclusive, does have a certain weight, and perhaps Chamanzaminli is really identical with Kurban Said." Yet within days of hearing of the quote attributed to her, Lucy Tal unequivocally denied having written the statement. In a letter to Schoenberg on June 2, 1973, Tal wrote: "Having read that document, I am quite startled. Never did I write such a letter to any Turks or anybody else. Why and what for? And it would have been so entirely unlike me. Such monstrous claims, how can one disprove them???" Tal und