Nikolai Tolstoy
The Name’s Oggins
The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
By Andrew Meier
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 403pp £20 order from our bookshop
This is a remarkable book, painstakingly researched. Intriguingly, it amounts effectively to a book within a book. So exhaustive have the author’s researches been that it seems unlikely that there is anything left to discover about its protagonist, save some withheld material lodged in FSB (formerly KGB) files in Moscow. A thin strain of biographical information lies buried within a vast and discursive congeries of ancillary information, relevant and (all too often) otherwise.
Cy (for Ysai) Oggins was born in 1898 to immigrant Russian Jewish parents in the provincial town of Willimantic, New England. His parents’ industry established them as a securely middle-class family, respected in the community. Cy proved himself sufficiently academically talented to enrol at Columbia University, where he
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf