girlfriend named Nina who, he argued, became "Nino" in the novel. "Anyone can say they are Kurban Said, but they can't tell you how they met Nino in Nikolay Street." He attested that his father had met a young woman named "Nino": "She was walking along Nikolay Street and father came from the Institute. They met here in the park, just like in the novel. He was nineteen and she was seventeen." A short story by Chamanzaminli, published in 1927, autobiographical in appearance, featured a starving writer in Paris in the mid-1920s (when Chamanzaminli was there) who works as a ghostwriter producing articles under the signature of someone else and getting only 25 percent of the earnings for them. Blair offers this as a clue that Chamanzaminli had in reality, not in fiction, produced writings that appeared under others' signatures. Blair implicitly conjectures that the novel must have also passed out of his possession and that he thus lost the capacity to receive credit for its writing. 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. If Chamanzaminli had a copy of the manuscript, Vezirov said, it must have been among those Vezirov reports Chamanzaminli burning in 1937 when Chamanzaminli fell under the suspicion of the KGB. Vezirov referred to an article from the 1930s, the authors of which, in Vezirov's characterization, resented Nussimbaum's use of the name "Essad Bey" and protested "that he wrote pornography that had nothing to do with history, that he was just inciting nations against each other." 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. "Draw your own conclusions," he declared. Panah Khalilov (alternative spelling: Penah Xelilov), as shown in the film Alias Kurban Said, is the creator of the Chamanzaminli archive. He referred in the film to a Chamanzaminli story published in 1907 which he believes is a "primary variant," rather than "the complete Ali and Nino." He also referred to "a book, written in German and published in Berlin" whose author had met Nussimbaum, had read Blood and Oil in the Orient, and "had written an essay about it in which he accuses him of insulting his people by saying that