SOLZHENITSYN TO RETURN TO HOMELAND

Author: By Michael Tighe, Associated Press

Date: Sunday, September 15, 1991
Page: 46
Section: METRO

"We'll definitely return back home to Russia," the exiled Soviet writer told the Associated Press at the town's bicentennial parade. "I said a long time ago that I definitely will return, and that stays intact. I'm not going to live here forever."

But Solzhenitsyn said the democratic movement sweeping the Soviet Union makes his return more likely now than ever before.

"Without these events, my return was completely out of the question," he said.

"These events are the ones that really opened the way for a return in the future. A return will definitely happen," Solzhenitsyn said, with his son Stephan acting as interpreter.

The Nobel Prize winner said he has not begun the process for his return. He did say that any return hinges on the Soviet government dropping the treason charge against him that led to his exile in 1974.

"The process hasn't started if for no other reason than the Soviet government hasn't yet taken away its charge of treason," he said. "They may do that in the future. That has always been a stumbling block."

Now 72, Solzhenitsyn was charged with treason and expelled for his writings.

His "Letter to the Leaders" called for many of the reforms that recently have come to pass. Those included free functioning for the Russian Orthodox church, an end to the Communist Party's monopoly on power, and independence for several of the Soviet republics.

Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish in 1976 with his wife, Natalia, and son, Stephan, who is now an 18-year-old student at Harvard University. He has lived as a recluse much of that time, but said he attended yesterday's bicentennial festivities because it was an important day for the town.

"It's a big rarity that you get a bicentennial. It's a big, important day," he said.

Solzhenitsyn mingled with the townspeople for much of the afternoon, shaking hands, autographing books and posing for pictures.

In the era of glasnost ushered in by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn's longer works have been published both in book and in serial form in the Soviet Union.

The writer is most noted for works such as "The Gulag Archipelago" and ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which contained devastating descriptions of life in Soviet prison camps and broad indictments of communism's legacy.

Solzhenitsyn said yesterday he cannot leave his Cavendish compound just yet because he is in the process of writing.

"You've got to understand that the key to it is that I have been writing here for a long time, and that's a process that a writer can't just stop, pick up and leave," he said.

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