Edition: U.S. / Global

Now on Moscow TV, Heeere's Aleksandr!

Published: April 14, 1995

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-Soviet dissident who while living in exile in Vermont turned his wrath on the empty materialism and lowbrow culture of the West, has found a new calling since he returned to a free Russia.

He is a talk show host.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, has not resorted to interviewing women-who-love-men-too-much or celebrity chefs. But the austere, bearded 76-year-old writer, a man revered and feared as a 20th-century prophet, has adapted quite nimbly to the mass media revolution that swept his country in his absence.

On his talk show, "A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn," he has chatted with well-known personalities like Svyatoslav N. Federov, a leading eye surgeon; Vladimir P. Lukin, a former Ambassador to Washington, and some of the country's most notable journalists.

Given to treating his guests to long, lofty monologues, Mr. Solzhenitsyn comes across as a combination of Charlie Rose and Moses.

"It is horrible that our officialdom is invulnerable," he said recently during a screed on the unaccountability of the Russian bureaucracy. "One cannot find the truth, and the horrible thing is that shamelessness is spilling over our society. The absence of conscience and honesty is the air of our society. It was like this in Soviet society, and it is going on now -- shamelessness is reigning."

The show is taped in Mr. Solzhenitsyn's apartment in Moscow, in his study. He and his guests sit side by side at his desk, against the backdrop of a giant bookcase crammed with books. Mr. Solzhenitsyn keeps a few handwritten notes on the desk, but mostly he speaks, apocalyptically, off the top of his head.

The Russian press has written almost nothing about the show. On the air since September, it has not been reviewed by television critics. But other Russian talk show hosts speak condescendingly about Mr. Solzhenitsyn's television venture.

"For the post-perestroika generation, he really means nothing," said Artyom Troitsky, a writer and rock critic who has a post-midnight talk show, "Cafe Oblomov."

"Why should anyone now care about the Gulag Archipelago?" he added. "I'm afraid that Solzhenitsyn is totally, totally passe."

But there are fans. Mr. Solzhenitsyn said on one show that he gets 30 to 40 letters a day, mostly from desperate older people imploring him to intercede on their behalf. He said his mail illustrated the corrosion of the Russian political system.

"In most cases, people ask for protection -- protection from courts, from state bodies of power, from officials," he said.

And some of the political leaders that Mr. Solzhenitsyn criticizes with such verve also pay heed to his show. President Boris N. Yeltsin's office often asks the television studio for transcripts of the program. So do some members of Parliament.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn recently staged a blistering attack on the Government's decision to reorganize state television and create a public station that will be partly owned by a consortium of banks and businesses that favor the current administration.

Sergei Blagovolin, the head of the public station, boasted that by not interfering with Mr. Solzhenitsyn's denunciation, he had illustrated the new station's commitment to fairness.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's ratings are respectable, but not high. An April 3 survey of 650 random Moscow viewers showed that while 12 percent watched his show, 19.3 percent preferred to watch the talk show of Vladimir Pozner, who learned how to whip up a studio audience American-style while working alongside Phil Donahue in the 1980's.

Some of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's worst fears about the Westernization of the Russian soul appear to be true: The show with the highest ratings, 26.6 percent, was "Wild Rose," a Mexican soap opera.

When Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia last May after 20 years in exile -- 18 in virtual isolation in Vermont -- his comeback caused a sensation that flared brightly but petered out.

Most Russians, preoccupied with their daily lives and economic survival, have tuned out the fierce rectitude and scolding of the man who spent eight years in Stalin's labor camps and exposed the full horror of Soviet oppression in works like "The Gulag Archipelago," "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "Cancer Ward."

After a two-month train ride across Siberia, which he took to reacquaint himself with ordinary Russians, he received little attention from the new Russian elite.

Democrats were alienated by his nationalistic views. Even former dissidents like Gleb Yakunin, a defrocked Russian Orthodox priest, worried openly that the inflexible Slavophile would become another "Ayatollah Khomeini," stirring up fundamentalism and xenophobia.

But Mr. Solzhenitsyn was equally withering about the ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, calling him a "caricature of a Russian patriot."

Younger intellectuals, more attuned to irony than moral certitude, take delight in knocking the towering figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

"It's better to have him speak than write," said Viktor Yerofeyev, a novelist and literary critic. "He writes such ugly Russian." He said that with the talk show, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had returned to his roots: "He is once again what he always was at heart -- a provincial schoolteacher."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's most recent opus, "The Red Wheel," a 5,000-page history of the Russian Revolution, was coolly received by critics and largely unread by the public.

So when he arrived in Moscow, Mr. Solzhenitsyn turned to a more accessible medium, television.

"We completely do everything that Mr. Solzhenitsyn wants," said Alvar V. Kakuchaya, director of the Russian state television channel, No. 1, that produces his talk show. "He knows how much we respect him. I think that is why he chose us to broadcast his program."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn alone selects his guests. When the station offered him 15 minutes, he demanded 20. He also insisted on being broadcast on prime time, 9:40 P.M., the slot after the news, even though he is up against highly popular movie channels.

However dour and uncompromising his message, Mr. Solzhenitsyn is an energetic and compelling speaker, surprisingly at ease before the camera. But there is little small talk on his show.

When he introduced one recent guest, Mr. Lukin, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the lower house of Parliament, as a former Ambassador to the United States, he brushed off Mr. Lukin's ingratiating reply -- "Oh, but you too were an ambassador ..." -- and raced ahead to one of his favorite topics, the perfidy of the West. The International Monetary Fund and Radio Liberty are among his pet peeves.

"This is a very ambiguous organization today; it seems to consist of our people, our contemporaries, living among us but receiving their salaries from Washington and their instructions from Washington," Mr. Solzhenitzyn said of Radio Liberty, which is financed by the United States Government. "This is direct interference in our affairs."

Mr. Lukin, like most other guests, did not get much of a chance to respond. Most shows are less a conversation than dueling monologues.

Which may explain why there will be a slight change in the format of "A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn" beginning next week. His wife, Natalya, explained that after an seven-month trial run, Mr. Solzhenitsyn has decided that the show would work better without guests.

Photos: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the austere author, has become a talk show host. He chats, below, with his wife, Natalya, and, above, with Svyatoslav N. Fedorov, Russia's most famous eye surgeon. (Gleb Kosorukov for The New York Times)