Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.

All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.

I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one - who was Lev Nussimbaum?

Tom Reiss Quotes