Ali & Nino, or: Who is Kurban Said
This blog post has originally been posted as thread on on Mastodon. I
What does a sleepy castle in a small village in Lower Austria have to do with Azerbaijan's most famous novel?
How come a German-Russian jude who converted to Islam and an Austrian baroness into play?
And who is Kurban Said?
It is the early 1910s in Baku, Azerbaijan, under Russian control.
Ali and Nino, both still at school, have loved each other for many years.
He belongs to a distinguished Azerbaijani family (of Persian ancestry) and is a Muslim. Despite his European education, he feels deeply that he is Asian.
She belongs to a distinguished Georgian family, the Russian authorities have permitted her to use the title 'Princess'. She is a Christian, and culturally European.
This is the plot of the novel "Ali and Nino", which was published in 1937 in Vienna, Austria.
The author of the novel is Kurban Said, which is a pseudonym.
For decades, the true identity behind Kurban Said was debated.
Change of scenery: Schloss Lichtenau im Waldviertel.
It isn't very spectacular nor of any relevance in history. But it was a playground for kids of previous generations and also to me.
While access the castle was forbidden, my father and his friends snucked in and explored it. Sometimes they got caught by the baroness, Elfriede Ehrenfels.
I never did such a thing, but I'd play in the tramway cars that were for whatever reason parked in the Maierhof of the castle.
This is Elfriede Ehrenfels. Born in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in Triest in 1894, she married anthropologist Rolf Freiherr von Ehrenfels in 1926. Rolf would later convert to Islam and call himself Omar. He had to flee Austria in 1938 and went to India, where he re-married Mireille Abeille, with whom he had a daughter, Leela Ehrenfels.
The Ehrenfels' were close friends with the author Lev Nussimbaum, who called himself "Essad Bey" after he converted to Islam.
1937 the novel "Ali and Nino" is published in Vienna E.P. Tal Verlag. The author of this book is "Kurban Said".
But Kurban Said does not exist. It is a pseudonym that Elfriede Ehrenfels registered.
But did she also write "Ali and Nino"? There were doubts about that.
So who is Kurban Said?
For decades, there has been a controversy about the identity of Kurban Said, the pseudonym used to hide the identity of the author of this novel.
No one has located or identified any existing manuscript of Ali and Nino. The publisher, Lucy Tal, claims that all papers were deliberately destroyed when the Nazis entered Vienna.
The closest anyone has come to such a find is Mireille Abeille, the woman Rolf Ehrenfels married in India, who would later live in Schloss Lichtenau for the rest of her life.
In the film "Alias Kurban Said" Mireille claims to possess half of the manuscript of "The Girl From the Golden Horn", the other novel published under the name Kurban Said.
In the film, however, she was unable to find the manuscript in and said that in fact she may not have seen it for ten or twenty years.
The claim that Lev Nussimbaum was the novel's author began circulating in 1944, when an Italian translation of the novel appeared, listing the author as "Mohammed Essad Bey." Lev was a close friend to Elfriede Ehrenfels and there are rumors that they had an affair.
One theory says that Lev wrote the book but Elfriede published it to protect him from the Nazis.
Elfriede's niece and Mireille's daughter Leela, who is the current holder of the copyright of the novel by inheritance, has documents proving that Elfriede is indeed the holder of the pseudonym "Kurban Said".
https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai124_folder/124_articles/124_readers_forum.html
In an interview from 1999, Mareille told about a conversation with Elfriede who said "Yes, I produced it". And this part seems to be true. However, if she also wrote it, this question remains unanswered.
Now, dear readers, what do you think?
Who is Kurban Said?
Epilogue
First of all, thank you for reading!
I stumbled across this story by pure chance when I was researching the history of my home town. Of course, this story simplifies things a lot, and I didn't want to make it more complicated, so I ignored other claims on the authorship as they are very unlikely.
Here's a picture I found. The baroness is on the far right. And I do in fact know one person in this image!
In 2007 a metal sculputre of "Ali and Ali" was built in Batumi, Georgia. It is still mindblowing to me that such an important piece of literature has ties to my sleepy home village.
Except for Leela, all the actors in the story are long gone. Leela inherited Schloss Lichtenau but sold it in 2022 as she didn't have any heirs and wanted to see it in good hands.
The castle is now beeing renovated and will be turned into something like a seminar hotel. The surrounding grounds are now closed to the public, wich makes me sad. Sad because the kids in town won't have the opportunity to exlpore this mystical place any longer.