that 'Essad, besides being a nervous type, seemed to indulge in outbursts of murderous rage, perhaps because he felt that this was his obligation as an ‘Oriental’ for whom revenge would be a sacred duty.' Brailow intervened to prevent his friend's 'Caucasian temper' from leading to murder." Reiss asserts that "though clearly juvenilia," Nussimbaum's unpublished early stories "had an irony that was instantly recognizable as the raw material of Ali and Nino and so many of the Caucasian books Lev would write." Additional evidence for Lev Nussimbaum's authorship: plagiarism and repetition Tamar Injia's book Ali and Nino – Literary Robbery! demonstrates that portions of Ali and Nino were "stolen" from the 1926 novel The Snake's Skin (Das Schlangenhemd) by Georgian author Grigol Robakidze. (It was published in Georgian in 1926 and in German in 1928. Injia analyzed the two books, found similar and identical passages, and concluded that "Kurban Said" (whom she identifies as Essad Bey) deliberately transferred passages from Robakidze's novel. The case for Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli's authorship The claim that the Azerbaijani novelist Yusif Vazir, known popularly as Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, is the true author of Ali and Nino appears to have begun in the preface to the 1971 Turkish edition of the novel, in which the Turkish translator Semih Yazichioghlu, claimed that Lucy Tal, the late widow of the original publisher E.P. Tal, had written a letter stating that in the 1920s "a handsome young man" had "left a pile of manuscripts" that the company published in 1937. (Lucy Tal unequivocally denied having written the statement, calling the assertions "monstrous claims.") Chamanzaminli's late sons Orkhan and Fikret have continued to make the claim. They began advocating for it at least by the 1990s after the first Azeri translation of Ali and Nino was published in 1990. An earlier Azeri translation had been made in 1972, but a complete rendering in Azeri, by Mirza Khazar, was published for the first time, serially, in three issues of the magazine Azerbaijan in 1990. Following this theory, Chamanzaminli has been listed as the author (rather than the standard "Kurban Said") in a number of editions, particularly in Azerbaijan where the has declared Chamanzaminli to be the author. In the 2004 film Alias Kurban Said, directed by Jos de Putter, Yusif Vazirov Chamanzaminli's late son Fikrat Vazirov offered an argument for Chamanzaminli's authorship. Chamanzaminli had been in a romantic relationship with a