After several months Nino visits Ali in his refuge in Daghestan where they get married and lead a happy life in poverty until the Russian imperial authorities quit Azerbaijan following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Now Ali has to hide from the Nachararyan clan to escape the vendetta and from the Russian police. He chases after them, but he only kills Nachararyan and spares Nino. Tradition of honour requires that Ali finds the fugitives and kills them. The wedding day is already close, when Ali is informed one night that Nachararyan kidnapped Nino. Some months later he asks Nino’s father for her hand, but he refuses at first and changes his mind only after the mediation of Ali’s older Armenian friend Melik Nachararyan. World War I breaks out and plunges Europe into chaos, but Ali doesn’t intend to fight for the Russian Empire. During the summer holidays after Ali’s graduation from high school the two get secretly engaged. He is the son of a notable Muslim family and Nino is the seventeen-year-old daughter of a newly rich Christian Georgian family. Five years later Ali is a young man of nineteen and in love with beautiful Nino Kipiani whom he knows since childhood. A teacher of the Russian high school in Baku, Azerbaijan (then part of the Russian Empire) talks about the dispute of scholars regarding the dividing line between Europe and Asia in Transcaucasia. The novel Ali and Nino begins with Ali Khan Shirvanshir’s memory of a geography class in 1909.

The case of Kurban Said is investigated in the Dutch documentary Alias Kurban Said by Jos de Putter released in 2004 and in the bestselling biography of Essad Bey by Tom Reiss titled The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life which came out in 2005. In the early 1970s claims were made that the Azeri writer Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli (Yusif Vəzir Çəmənzəminli: 1887-1942) collaborated with Essad Bey on Ali and Nino which is supported by some scholars. In 1944, however, rumour spread that Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942), better known under his pen name Essad Bey, was the true author of the novels and today it’s widely accepted that the German-language writer originating from Baku in Azerbaijan must have been their co-author at least. First of all there is the Austrian Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof (1894-1982) who signed the publishing contract and registered the copyright. Up to this day nobody knows for certain who was the real person hiding behind it, but three possible authors have been made out.

Kurban Said is a pseudonym under which two German-language novels have been published, namely Ali and Nino ( Ali und Nino: 1937) and The Girl from the Golden Horn ( Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn: 1938).

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