Solzhenitsyn Heads Home to Write Russia’s Wrongs : Culture: Dissident author faces uneasy homecoming in a land caught in a painful post-Soviet rebirth.

The newest estate on a bluff over the Moscow River is an imposing red brick dacha with two stories, two wings and a high green fence secluding its 10 pine-shaded acres. From the outside, it looks worthy of the great man who plans to spend his final years here.

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the dissident writer who exposed and outlasted his Soviet tormentors, is returning home next Friday after 20 years in exile to rediscover his beloved Russia and offer his wisdom to help guide its painful post-Communist rebirth.

But before he can weigh in on such issues as the gulf between Russia’s rich and poor, the grip of organized crime, the spread of Western consumer culture and the specter of fascism, he faces an irritating little problem right under his new doorstep.

The basement leaks.

In his first lesson about the new Russia, Solzhenitsyn has fallen victim to the capitalist version of an old Soviet problem-- khaltura , or shoddy workmanship. As often happens here, the author did not have a contract and the architect refused to do it over for free.

The affront may be trifling compared to Solzhenitsyn’s eight-year imprisonment in Josef Stalin’s gulag and expulsion by Leonid I. Brezhnev’s KGB, but it is just one sign that the 75-year-old sage is in for an uneasy homecoming. Apart from the trials of daily life, he returns as a controversial figure.

Many Russians look forward to the reunion; students born after he left are even writing essays anticipating it. Older people say they’ve longed for a moral leader of his stature since the death of fellow dissident and Nobel-winning physicist Andrei D. Sakharov in 1989. Politicians across the spectrum are poised to pounce on his every word as proof of their version of the truth.

But some Russians curse Solzhenitsyn and his writings as a destroyer of an old order they miss. Others say he may be returning too late to shape the new one.

In a country changing so quickly and seemingly so adrift, many Russians ask, What difference can any great artist or prophet make?

“He doesn’t have a real understanding of the country he’s coming back to,” says Mikhail Y. Shvydkoi, Russia’s deputy culture minister. “Perhaps this is because people who live in this country don’t have a real understanding of it either.”

Some are simply afraid for him. Mail from friends in Russia is running 9 to 1 against his return, according to his wife, Natalia.

“They are saying it’s a terrible situation now,” she reports. “Don’t go. You are very valuable for Russia, but you won’t be safe.”

But Solzhenitsyn, who settled with his wife, mother-in-law and three sons in Cavendish, Vt., in 1976, has been planning his return for three years since finishing “The Red Wheel,” an epic history of Russia on the eve of the 1917 Revolution.

His citizenship, stripped away by the Soviet regime, was restored in 1990.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin phoned two years later with a personal appeal to come home.

Shvydkoi says the government plans “a very honorable ceremony.”

Mindful of his preference for rural surroundings, Moscow’s city government last year gave Solzhenitsyn land use rights here on the western outskirts of the capital, the “dachaland” of past and present Kremlin elites. It also sold him the buildings on the 10-acre property, which originally belonged to a Stalinist henchman named Lazar Kaganovich.

The Solzhenitsyns had the old house torn down and a new one built at their own expense. One of the two wings will be the family’s living quarters, the other a workplace and repository of the author’s extensive library and archives, which will be open to researchers.

As the family began packing in Vermont last winter, plans to finish the house this spring went awry.

Snowfall on the roof turned to ice, widened the seams between the copper tiles and melted into the house when the heating system came on. More water leaked into the basement from a poorly insulated outdoor porch.

“It was a disaster,” says Mrs. Solzhenitsyn, who came to Moscow to clean up. She replaced the architect and the roof, then halted all other work, leaving the basement to be repaired this summer.

“The house is only walls and roof now,” she told The Times in a telephone interview from Vermont. “There’s nothing inside, not even a floor. . . . We decided it was impossible to continue the work until we live in Russia. People take advantage. You have to be around.”

Until the house is ready, the family will live on Moscow’s Plyushchikha Street in a five-room apartment that Mrs. Solzhenitsyn bought two years ago.

She says her husband will spend much of the summer traveling around Russia “meeting lots of people and listening to them about life today,” then start writing short stories and playing “some role as a public figure” outside politics.

“He won’t recognize the country when he comes back,” says Irina Nefedyeva, a 35-year-old teacher, as she shopped on Plyushchikha the other day. “Everything is changing, but it’s hard to say in which direction.”

Along the street, a Russian Orthodox church closed by the Communists has reopened, but a textile plant is struggling, and two bakeries have closed. To eke out a profit, a tiny food shop also sells Japanese-made TV sets and VCRs. The newest store specializes in American car accessories.

A lot of what the author disdains as “squalid mass culture” from the West--novelized versions of the Charles Bronson movie “Death Wish,” an Italian TV series “Octopus,” a Mexican soap opera “Simply Maria”--is available at the neighborhood bookstore, which didn’t bother reordering Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” when they ran out a few months ago.

“To put it mildly, Solzhenitsyn’s books are not as popular now” as when they were banned under the Soviet regime, says Alexandra V. Nezhikova, who works in the store. “When there are none of his books for sale, nobody asks for them.”

Even some of Russia’s intelligentsia admit having trouble staying awake with “The Red Wheel.”

The political and cultural elite are far more interested in how Solzhenitsyn judges 1994.

Solzhenitsyn laid out some of his views this month in an interview for Forbes magazine that was reprinted by the Russian newspaper Izvestia and found some common ground with Communists and radical nationalists.

For example, he suggested that Yeltsin was wrong to privatize farmland and is not adequately defending the rights of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics. He also warned that some Americans want to “weaken Russia.”

Democratic reformers, who have long suspected Solzhenitsyn of autocratic instincts, reacted with fear that he will exert a reactionary influence on Yeltsin. For his part, Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov sounds encouraged.

“He will come back and he will not be happy at all with the picture unveiled before his eyes,” Zyuganov says. “We will gratefully accept his words of truth.”

Those inspired by Solzhenitsyn to fight the Communist regime say the most they expect of him now is to stay above the political fray and somehow make it more civil.

Lev Timofeev, 57, a dissident jailed in the mid-1980s, credits the author with giving his generation “the language of freedom.”

“The most acute problem now is how to find a language of social accord,” Timofeev says. “When Yeltsin proclaims this, a great number of people dismiss it as a political trick. But if such an idea is proclaimed by Solzhenitsyn, that’s absolutely another thing. I hope that Solzhenitsyn will create this new language.”

Russian literary figures of earlier eras--Dostoevsky and Tolstoy under the czars, Pasternak under the Bolsheviks--assumed such roles as public figures and moral critics. But they were present to witness the changes of their times for themselves.

“Solzhenitsyn’s authority is weakened by his distance from events,” says Benedict M. Sarnov, a leading Russian literary critic. “He is counting on being a guru, but I think he will be disappointed. I would advise him not to come back. . . . What Russia needs now is not prophets but pragmatists.”

The debate echoes in Russian high schools, where Solzhenitsyn’s works are taught alongside those of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Bulgakov and Dostoevsky.

At School No. 1289 in Moscow, 11th graders say it’s cool to throw around Solzhenitsyn’s name, even if they don’t actually read him or can’t remember what gulag means. One classroom discussion turned into a spirited argument between two 17-year-olds, Timofei Kiselev and Yelena Sayenko.

Timofei: “Why is Solzhenitsyn coming back? What can he do here? We have a very unstable economic and political situation. The country is not ready to accept him.”

Yelena: “We should accept him. He’s a genius.”

Timofei: “Sure, but what can he do about our economy?”

Yelena: “He can help us understand each other, to live in peace.”

Timofei: “Not now. Maybe in the future.”

Yelena: “He’ll be dead.”

Timofei: “His books will always be around. But the country doesn’t need him now. We need first of all not a good writer but good government, economic stability.”

Burdened by daily hardships, some Russians view Solzhenitsyn’s return next week with a what’s-in-it-for-me attitude, either cynical indifference or a naive expectation that it will improve their material lot.

Hope is high among the modest villagers who live outside the fence around Solzhenitsyn’s unfinished dacha. Relieved that it was the great writer and not some Mafioso or Kremlin big shot moving in, they are wondering whether he might get the neighborhood some gas heating or at least a sewage system.

“We are looking forward to meeting him and talking to him,” says Viktor S. Strunkin, a 50-year-old radio mechanic, stopping on the muddy road by a garbage dump 100 yards from Solzhenitsyn’s gate.

“Maybe the authorities will remove this awful dump,” he adds. “Maybe they will pave this road. I can’t imagine that Solzhenitsyn will love having a garbage dump right under his nose.”