The biographical novel by American journalist Tom Riis is dedicated to Lev Nussimbaum (1905–1942), a Baku Jew who converted to Islam, an adventurer and writer who published his books under the pseudonyms Kurban Said and Esad Bey. His main novel, Ali and Nino, a bestseller of the 1930s, experienced a renaissance in the 1970s and was translated into forty languages. However, until Tom Riis' investigation, the real name of the man who was hiding under the pseudonym Kurban Said on the cover of the book remained unknown. Using the example of one life, “full of secrets and dangers,” Riis describes the collapse of the Russian Empire, the fate of emigration in Istanbul and Berlin, the emergence of fascism in Germany, the Great Depression in the USA, that is, in fact, he creates his own version of the history of the first half of the 20th century. The book will be doubly interesting to the Russian reader, since it touches on the sore subject of the national policy of the Russian Empire in Transcaucasia and provides a fascinating example of the life of a Russian European who established his own relations with the Muslim world and was accepted by this world as one of his own.