We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a
geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian
Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia: thirty
Mohammedans, four Armenians, two Poles, three Sectarians, and
one Russian. The opening lines of Ali and Nino takes us back to
a classroom in Russian-controlled northern Azerbaijan at the
wake of World War I, to Baku, an oil-boom port city on the
Caspian Sea. The ethnic mosaic of Muslim Azeris (mostly Shi’i),
Armenians, Jews, and Russians, the continued Russian colonial
rule that dated back to early 19th century, the oil boom, and
various imperial rivalries all gave rise to social, religious,
and ethnic tensions that characterized not only life in Baku but
in other cities across the Caucasus and the Balkans. The novel
may be described as a Caucasian version of Bridge on the Drina
by Ivo Andric, or of Romeo and Juliet: it tells the tale of two
young lovers, an Azeri Muslim boy and a Georgian girl who try to
overcome religious divides and