Ali and Nino (#europe, #WITMonth)

"...and Nino Kipriani was still the most beautiful girl in the world."

Ali and Nino are in their late teens and finishing their schooling in Baku just before World War I. Baku (now in Azerbaijan) was then part of the Russian Empire. Ali attends an elite Russian-run school for non-Russians; he's good at languages, bad at most other subjects, but good enough at math that he can help Nino with her homework.

"Ali Khan, a train goes from the town X to the town Y, doing 50 miles an hour..."

Ali is a Shiite Muslim, and Nino is Georgian Orthodox and they're in love.

His relatives are all in Persia; hers in Georgia, but family differences are the least of the impediments to their love. His father is happy with the marriage; hers only insists that she finish school first. 

Ali doesn't drink--until he goes off to Tiflis to meet Nino's cousins. Oh, my head! Accommodating their own  different world views is the greater challenge.

The first half of the novel is light and charming and funny. It doesn't get to stay that way: world events intervene. A servant reports the news:

"Nothing special, little master. The neighbour's women have quarrelled, a donkey bolted, it ran into the well, and there it still is. The czar has deigned to declare war on several European monarchs."

It may have all seemed very far off at first, but Baku saw the armies of Tsarist Russia, the Sunni Ottoman Empire, the English, the soldiers of the briefly independent Azerbaijan, and finally the return of Russian soldiers, now Soviet.

Highly recommended.

The novel crisscrosses the Caucasus with scenes set in Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran, but is mainly in Baku: "This wonderful town, the gate of Europe." 

I learned about the novel from Major Yammerton's blog who also read it for this year's European Reading Challenge. His thoughts are here.

The novel first came out in German, in Austria, in 1937. A difficult time and it didn't have much opportunity to make an impact at first. Kurban Said is a pseudonym, and now nobody is quite sure who he or she was. Likely enough, it was more than one person working together. The candidates: Yusif Vazir Chamanziminli was an Azerbaijani statesman and author killed by Stalin's minions in 1943. Lev Nussimbaum was born a Jew in Kiev, but lived much of his younger years in Baku and converted to Islam, writing sometimes as Essad Bey. And then there's Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, in whose name the copyright was registered. Nussimbaum and Ehrenfels were known to be friends. There are other, less probable candidates as well.

And if one of the people hiding behind the pseudonym Kurban Said is Ehrenfels, this also counts for:

The novel was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 1970.