A short story by Chamanzaminli, published in 1927, autobiographical in appearance, featured a starving writer in Paris in the mid-1920s (when Chamanzaminli was there) who works as a ghostwriter producing articles under the signature of someone else and getting only 25 percent of the earnings for them. Blair offers this as a clue that Chamanzaminli had "in reality", not in fiction, produced writings that appeared under others' signatures. Blair implicitly conjectures that the novel must have also passed out of his possession and that he thus lost the capacity to receive credit for its writing. Fikret Vezirov has proffered the claim that Chamanzaminli had to hide his identity behind the name Kurban Said so that he would not be identified with the anti-Bolshevik views contained in "Ali and Nino". If Chamanzaminli had a copy of the manuscript, Vezirov said, it must have been among those Vezirov reports Chamanzaminli burning in 1937 when Chamanzaminli fell under the suspicion of the KGB. Vezirov referred to an article from the 1930s, the authors of which, in Vezirov's characterization, resented Nussimbaum's use of the name "Essad Bey" and protested "that he wrote pornography that had nothing to do with history, that he was just inciting nations against each other." Vezirov cited the fact that his father had traveled to Iran, Tblisi, Kislovodsk, and Daghestan (all visited by the novel's characters) as another self-evident link. "Draw your own conclusions," he declared.