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.