Robin Ashenden

Robin Ashenden is former editor and founder of the Central and East European London Review. He is currently writing a novel about Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn, and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

14 Posts

Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had

Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.

Robin Ashenden

11 Jul 2023 · 12 min read

Thoughtful Aesthete or Cheerful Philistine?

On art, artists, and the divided soul of comedian Russell Kane.

Robin Ashenden

10 Mar 2023 · 9 min read

Low Life and High Style

Cruel, indiscreet, misanthropic and miserable, columnist Jeffrey Bernard nevertheless produced some bracing and scabrously funny journalism.

Robin Ashenden

9 Feb 2023 · 14 min read

In From the Cold

Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich at 60.

Robin Ashenden

25 Nov 2022 · 15 min read

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud

Biden, Putin, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Robin Ashenden

25 Oct 2022 · 15 min read

Red Letter Day

How an unknown teacher from Leningrad took on Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev—and ultimately won.

Robin Ashenden

29 Sep 2022 · 12 min read

Lydia and the Vlads

An Estonian’s changing relationship with Russia.

Robin Ashenden

26 Aug 2022 · 12 min read

Boris Beheaded

From restoration to regicide.

Robin Ashenden

8 Jul 2022 · 9 min read

Has Olivia Manning’s ‘Fortunes of War’ Finally Found Its Moment?

The Ukrainian war has made Manning’s writing more relevant now than at any time since it was written.

Robin Ashenden

2 Jun 2022 · 11 min read

Interview with Slavenka Drakulić—the East-West Doyenne of the 1990s

Living under a totalitarian regime one knows censorship in and out. One can smell it from far away and I smell it in this terror of political correctness—or, if we turn it around, in the danger of expressing different, unpopular views.

Robin Ashenden

20 Jul 2021 · 13 min read

The Enduring Relevance of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘The Captive Mind’

It is into such pathologies that The Captive Mind delves, and why it has such application to our time.

Robin Ashenden

19 Mar 2021 · 11 min read

Under the Frog: Why Tibor Fischer’s 1992 Booker-Nominated Novel May Have Found its Moment

Under the Frog was based on his Magyar parents, both of them basketball players who, in the wake of the doomed 1956 uprising against the Soviets, fled Hungary for Britain.

Robin Ashenden

9 Sep 2020 · 11 min read

Bernard Rose's Forgotten Tolstoy Trilogy

This is the least operatic, and most touching, of the trilogy.

Robin Ashenden

22 Jun 2020 · 8 min read

George Faludy: Hungarian Poet and Hero for Our Times

Faludy’s greatest weapon—what really allows him to swat away the mosquitoes of passing ideologies—is his delight in sensual pleasures.

Robin Ashenden

19 Apr 2019 · 6 min read