Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli

Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli
Yusif Vazir photographed as a law student in 1911
Born	Yusif Mirbaba oghlu Vazirov (1887-09-12)September 12, 1887 Shusha, Russian Empire
Died	January 3, 1943(1943-01-03) (aged 55) Sukhobezvodnoye Gulag camp near Gorky, USSR
Pen name	Chamanzaminli, Kurban Said, Ali Khan Chamanzaminli and about a dozen other minor pen names.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, political activist
Nationality	Azerbaijani
Period	Pre-revolutionary and early Soviet
Genre	novels, short stories, essays, articles
Notable works	Ali and Nino (1937 as core author to which Essad Bey added some folkloric elements) Maiden Spring (1934) Between Two Fires (published posthumously 1968)
Spouse	Bilgeyis Ajalova
Children	Orkhan (1928-2010), Fikret (1929-2004),

Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli (Azerbaijani: Yusif Vəzir Çəmənzəminli), also spelled Chemenzeminli, born Yusif Mirbaba oghlu Vazirov (12 September 1887, Shusha - 3 January 1943, Sukhobezvodnoye Gulag camp near the present-day Nishny Novgorod) was an Azerbaijani statesman and writer known for his novels, short stories, essays, and diaries. Evidence points to the fact that Chamanzaminli was the primary core author of the famous romance novel Ali and Nino first published in 1937 in Austria under the pen-name of Kurban Said.

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Chamanzaminli was born the second son of seven children to Mirbaba Mirabdulla oghlu Vazirov (died 1906) and Seyid Aziza Seyid Husein gizi (died 1910) in the town of Shusha, which was then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a mugham teacher and a connoisseur of literature, who spoke Persian and Turkish and had travelled considerably throughout the region.

After graduating from the primary school of Blindman Khalifa in 1895, Chamanzaminli pursued his studies at the Realschule of Shusha. But then, the Armenian-Azerbaijani civil war broke out (1905–1906) and his family fled Shusha. As his father had just died, his mother, younger brother and sisters settled in Ashgabad, Turkmenistan, to be closer to relatives. Vazirov managed to get a meagre stipend with a few other students from Shusha to finish his education (1906–1909) at Realni High School in Baku. He published his first work in the local Azeri-language periodicals Sada and Molla Nasraddin. It was in the summer of 1907 when Yusif Vazirov went to visit his mother in Ashgabad that he met Berta Maiseyeva, a Third Year Student at Ashgabad Gymnasium. She seems to be the prototype for the character of "Nino" in the novel "Ali and Nino," eventually published in 1937 in Vienna. In fact, many of the historical references in the novel can be traced back to the period of time when Vazirov was a high school student in Baku, as revealed in his diaries.