SOLZHENITSYN FEELS THE STING OF NEGLECT

Author: By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, May 30, 1995
Page: 2
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

When his plane touched down in the eastern port of Vladivostok on May 27, 1994, 20 years after the Kremlin kicked him out of the country for his attacks on the Soviet system, many wondered which would be changed more by the homecoming: Solzhenitsyn or Russia?

The answer, it turned out, is neither. Each has remained equally rocklike.

Expectations were higher a year ago. Although the Nobel Prize-winning author said he would not seek political office, he clearly desired a political role. "I really want to help our homeland," he said at his first news conference. "Through public activity, meetings, persuasion, magazine articles . . . I will speak out as much as I can."

Gleb Yakunin, a liberal legislator, spoke for many when he said of Solzhenitsyn, "If he falls into nationalist extremism, he has a chance of being a Russian Khomeini. If he doesn't, he may become a moral leader."

Neither scenario has come true.

When he first came back, Solzhenitsyn reacted angrily to an article in Moskovsky Komsomolets that said he had "missed the plane," that he could have been a leader four or five years earlier but now it was too late.

''I think I'm arriving at just the right moment," Solzhenitsyn said. ''People are just coming to the moment when they can think about their destinies in life."

Yet in the year since, Solzhenitsyn, now 76, has played no role in the country's political dialogue. Several Russian journalists, when asked if they had heard Solzhenitsyn's name come up in conversation the past six months, all replied, "No." He speaks out rarely, except on his biweekly television talk show, which is also rarely discussed.

One sign of his irrelevance has been his silence on the issue that now defines Russian politics -- the war in Chechnya. Yevgeny Kiselev, host of ''Itogi," a popular week-in-review TV news show, said, "I find it very strange that someone who sees himself as a moral leader should not be speaking about Chechnya."

In a newspaper interview last January, Solzhenitsyn said the tiny breakaway republic should be granted independence, except for a northern slice of its territory, which he considered a part of Russia. Since then, he has said little on the subject.

Through an intermediary, he turned down several requests for an interview.

Solzhenitsyn's return to Russia started out in a political key. In Vladivostok and at whistle-stops along his 58-day train ride to Moscow, he denounced the current regime as a "pseudodemocracy," its economic reforms as ''brainless." In October, speaking before parliament, he attacked the government for its "vestiges of the Communist nomenklatura," the legislature for its "slow pace" and "shallow laws," and described a Russian people ''stupefied and shocked by the humiliation and shame of their weakness."

But he devoted most of his speech to the idea of reviving the 17th- century institution of the "zemstvo," which tied peasant communities to local and regional authorities. In several subsequent interviews, he spoke of practically nothing but zemstvo, calling it "Russia's only hope."

Even those who liked the idea in the abstract doubted its relevance for modern Russia. Some saw his obsession with zemstvo as a sign that 20 years of exile, 18 of them isolated in Vermont, had placed the would-be prophet out of touch.

As a literary figure, too, the author of "Gulag Archipelago" and ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" -- books that reshaped not only the Russian novel but Russian history -- has not reoccupied center stage. This month, he published two short stories in the journal Novy Mir; the response has been nearly nonexistent.

Many young Russian writers, who value irony and stylishness, poke fun at Solzhenitsyn, whose prose is not known for either. But many sympathetic writers are also unimpressed with his reentry. Lev Anninsky, a critic who chaired the jury for this year's Booker Prize for Russian novels, considers Solzhenitsyn "one of the great writers of the 20th century," but finds the Novy Mir stories "below expectations. . . . They will not have much influence."

Yuri Buida, a noted young novelist, said he too respects Solzhenitsyn, ''but he is a writer for another generation, another time."

KKAPLA;05/28 NIGRO ;05/31,06:35 SOLZHE30