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.")