novels. 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." He is "seemingly untouched emotionally" by Azerbaijan's loss of independence. In contrast, Ali and Nino portrays the country's conquest by the USSR in 1920 as an agonizing tragedy. Blair writes: However, in a scene reminiscent of that same Blood and Oil in the Orient quotation, in chapter 22 of Ali and Nino, Ali tells his father, "Asia is dead..." To which Ali's father replies, "Asia is not dead. Its borders only have changed, changed forever. Baku is now Europe. And that is not just a coincidence. There were no Asiatics left in Baku any longer." 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. 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. She acknowledges that Nussimbaum left "fingerprints" on the book, but asserts that his contribution is limited to folkloric and legendary material, some of which he copied from his earlier books, which she shows is often neither culturally or ethnically reliable. (Much of this echoes Tom Reiss's account of Nussimbaum's writing.) Blair asserts that Nussimbaum could not have acquired the knowledge of Azerbaijan evident in Ali and Nino during his time in Baku, which ended when he was 14 years old, and during which time he had limited contact with Azerbaijani life. Therefore, in her view, he could not have written significant portions of the novel. She claims that Nussimbaum did not sympathize with the Azerbaijani national cause embodied in the novel and that he wrote his books, she judges, too quickly to have written them by himself. Therefore, she hypothesizes, he must have "gained access to the" (hypothetical) "original manuscripts" and "embellished them." She posits that the novel has a self-contradictory quality that can be explained through the hypothesis that it was based on something Chamanzaminli wrote but that it had been altered by Nussimbaum. Criticisms of Blair's argumentation 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