TV REVIEW : Elegant Look at Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Homecoming’

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose novels detailing Soviet oppression and terror made him Russia’s greatest literary voice of conscience since Leo Tolstoy, appears to be a man suspended between two worlds.

In the elegant BBC-”Frontline” co-production by Archie Baron, “The Homecoming,” we follow Solzhenitsyn from his exile home of 20 years in Vermont to his 1994 return to Russia. He is not really at home, though, in either place.

Seen scribbling away for hours with dozens of different pens (which he uses like a painter uses a different color or brush), the novelist used exile and the Vermont quiet to ply his craft. He says that during his years in the United States, he used the phone no more than five times. America was his study room, and no more. (His grown sons, by contrast, seem quite Americanized.)

Baron’s camera follows the Solzhenitsyn family as this peace is upended with plans to return to the homeland and take an eight-week rail tour through the countryside. His wife, Natalia, takes care of all advance work; the great man wishes only to meet the people, attend town meetings and write.

“The Homecoming” subtly shows the culture shock felt by people away from home so long. Natalia can’t handle the media crush--unknown in the old days--shouting at the press that they are “the world’s second oldest profession.” The novelist is visibly burdened by one face-to-face encounter after another, hearing the bitter complaints of citizens suffering from poverty and political confusion. His face reveals that things are worse than he imagined during his decades in the Vermont woods.

But he also seems to be happy, riding the train through Russia, feeling on familiar soil, meeting fellow survivors of the gulag prison camps.

Like some Russians on camera, however, we wonder how this venerated figure can adapt to a country where trains--such as his own--are stopped by mobsters for “protection money.”

Indeed, what this beautifully felt film doesn’t explore is Solzhenitsyn’s deep Russian Orthodox beliefs, his disgust with modernity and for most things Western. As we fade out, Solzhenitsyn appears to be setting up permanent residency in Moscow, but where he fits inside the new Russia remains a mystery. The film abruptly cuts off before the writer takes his new, more dangerous journey.

* “The Homecoming” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.