Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet.Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography.Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Saids masterpiece. In the 1950s, however, Jenia Graman, a German who had settled in England during the war, found a copy on a Berlin bookstall, translated it into English, and had it published for a second time. First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure has been compared to Dr. The outbreak of the Second World War could easily have meant that Ali and Nino was never discovered by an English-speaking audience. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942. A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria. Born in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. Was it possible that the Austrian countess who signed the original publishing contract, Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, could have written a novel that displays such extraordinary insight into the atmosphere of pre-First World War Baku and intimate knowledge of Muslim culture? Recent research seems to prove, once and for all, that her friend Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who had escaped Azerbaijan during the Russian Revolution and settled in Berlin, was the real 'Kurban Said'.
For a long time the identity of the author who used the pseudonym 'Kurban Said' to write Ali and Nino, published in Vienna in 1937, has been surrounded by controversy.
