What was going on when I was born?

The new Attorney General of Rhode Island announced today that the state would re-try Claus von B"ulow on charges that he had attempted to murder his wife. The announcement by the Attorney General, Arlene Violet, who took office five days ago, resolved the major policy question confronting her office. April 2 Date Set A jury in Newport, R.I., found Mr. von B"ulow guilty of twice injecting his wife, Martha, with insulin in attempts to kill her. She has lain in a coma since December 1980. The jury reached its decision in March 1982 after a trial that lasted more than two months.

Since the Apollo Theater closed its doors in 1976, several unsuccessful efforts have been made to revive the 72-year-old Harlem landmark. Now the final piece of a financing package to put a cable-TV studio and performing-arts center in the legendary theater has been put into place: a commitment by the State of New York Mortgage Agency to insure 75 percent of a $2.9 million permanent mortgage from Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company.

Konstantin U. Chernenko said today that the Geneva arms-control talks with the United States must be ''honest and businesslike'' and that the Soviet Union would brook no attempts at deception. Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko are due to arrive in Geneva on Sunday for a two-day meeting aimed at preparing the ground for a new set of arms negotiations. (Page 10.) Mr. Chernenko stressed the Kremlin's desire to block an arms race in outer space, saying the militarization of space would be irreversible.

The Czechoslovak writer Milan Kundera, whose latest novel is ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' left his country for France in 1975. His play ''Jacques and His Master'' - which he calls a variation on Denis Diderot's ''Jacques le Fataliste,'' an 18th-century novel of the road about novels of the road and the relations between masters and servants - was first produced in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1980. It has since been staged in Greece, Germany, Switzerland and France. Mr. Kundera's ''Jacques'' will have its English-language premiere Jan. 16 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., under the direction of Susan Sontag. The text of the play and the following introduction have been translated by Michael Henry Heim and will be published next month by Harper & Row. When in 1968 the Russians occupied my small country, all my books were banned and I suddenly lost all legal means of earning a living. A number of people tried to help me; one day a director came and proposed that I write a stage adaptation, under his name, of Dostoyevsky's ''The Idiot.''

AS a result of a recent surge in noneviction conversions, sponsors have their hands full of unsold cooperative and condominium apartments occupied by rent-stablized or rent-controlled tenants. Most sponsors keep the apartments as long-term investments or sell them in lots as tax-sheltered investments to syndicators and other experienced investors at prices deeply discounted from the value of the apartments if vacant. But some converters have begun to cultivate the retail market, selling single occupied apartments at more moderate discounts to individual buyers, many with little experience in real-estate investment. Is a renter-occupied apartment a good deal for the nonprofessional investor who wants occupancy sooner or later, or who hopes to achieve a substantial financial gain through an eventual resale? Seven professionals and several investors said they would discourage such an investment unless the person consulted a real-estate lawyer or accountant who was familiar with its intricacies and was able to compare it with safer, more conventional alternatives.

PEKING In many respects, Haidianlu is much like any other street in Peking. It is windblown, dusty and crowded with bicycles. But here, not far from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is to be found one of the cutting edges of the new revolution with which Chinese leaders hope to sweep the country into prosperity in the 21st century. China is in the full bloom of a love affair with the computer, and the signs of it are everywhere. In the past two years, computer shops have been springing up along streets like Haidianlu in most major cities here, offering the latest in microcomputers, software and ancillary equipment. Most of the wares are Japanese and American; the rest are close copies originating with China's own fledgling industry.

Want to know how they play Dvorak in Prague? Or in Rotterdam, or Denver? Curious to hear how Beethoven fares these days in Cincinnati or Cleveland, how Mahler is making out in Israel and Los Angeles, what sort of Bruckner Parisians are getting (and whether it affects their Ravel)? Wondering how the string players stack up in Toronto and Montreal? You can learn all this and much, much more this season at Carnegie and Avery Fisher Halls, where more than 25 full symphonic ensembles and at least half as many chamber orchestras will converge on New York from Salzburg, Stockholm, Poland, Pittsburgh, Rome, Rochester, the norths of England and France, and points round the globe. But to a depressing and puzzling extent the answers are likely to be ''Pretty much the same as in New York.'' Or ''just like whatever you heard over the radio this morning.'' The world's most celebrated orchestras - Philadelphia, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and the comparable elite - have long made extended tours, often international ones, year after year; and the past two decades have seen a surge in travel by the orchestras of smaller cities, ensembles without immediate name recognition outside the profession. But at the very moment the exchange of orchestras between nations is reaching its busiest phase to date, that exchange may be well on its way to becoming artistically irrelevant as the differences between one orchestra and another blur and threaten to vanish.

''You'd never go to Hollywood, would you?'' they used to say to serious young writers. Indeed serious young writers used to say the same thing to themselves, seeking to inoculate themselves against a contagion they secretly hoped they might not be wholly spared. (''Lord, make me chaste,'' prayed St. Augustine, ''but not yet.'') Hollywood was not a geographic location; it was a Fate Worse Than The Reader's Digest. We all knew that unspeakable things happened to talent once it had crossed the Rockies. The loud example of Scott Fitzgerald (and what Joe Manckiewicz did to him) would keep us forever from The Warner Brothers' commissary, and similar places where they eat writers along with the Caesar salad. (Actually the food alone is adequate deterrent, unless you're very heavily into two-scoop tuna or best leather pastrami.) In fact, of course, Fitzgerald's decline (and frequent falls) began in Paris and on the Riviera, and even in New York, places where those dedicated to literature have never hesitated to congregate, without any obvious attempt to avoid the local maladies - sloth, envy, greed and journalism.

Doug Flutie ended his stirring career at the school with a Cotton Bowl victory four days ago, but the little man still lives at Boston College. Michael Adams, the 5-foot-7-inch point guard for the Eagles basketball team, hasn't attained the legendary stature Flutie achieved in football. But Adams is already a big man in the eyes of top-ranked Georgetown, which survived a serious scare from Adams and the Eagles before gaining an 82-80 overtime victory at the Capital Centre. The Big East Conference triumph preserved Georgetown's unblemished record at 13-0 and raised the Hoyas' unbeaten streak to 24 games over two seasons.

AUGUST STRINDBERG By Olof Lagercrantz. Translated by Anselm Hollo. Illustrated. 399 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.50. IT wouldn't have been very difficult to dislike August Strindberg, even to hate him. As a friend he was insupportable, inevitably turning with deadly suspicion on those who helped him; as a lover he was lethal; as a husband and father unpredictable, to say the least. Olof Lagercrantz does not stoop to sparing his subject and perhaps that is why, by the last chapters of his absorbing and profound biography of the great 19th-century Swedish author, the question of admiration or condemnation simply ceases to exist. In his life's stuggles Strindberg regarded himself as paradigmatic, mankind's leading edge cutting into the future, and he is one of the rare instances of a man with such a conviction who turned out to be right.

Before the afternoon was over, the Bruins would score a goal as the net flew from its hinges, Herb Brooks would knock over two dozen sticks, one Ranger would fall on his face and break his nose, and the Rangers' best two defenseman would leave the game with injuries. It was a black day for the Rangers. All the fire and tempestuousness of an afternoon at the Boston Garden led to a 3-3 tie between the Rangers and the Bruins. And once again, as they have so often this season, the Rangers were left bemoaning the loss of important players. In a season of constant injuries, one of the most serious occurred today when Tom Laidlaw suffered a ruptured spleen. The defenseman left the arena after the game and was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital where, in a 90- minute operation, the spleen was removed.

When the Jefferson Trust Renaissance Center in Hoboken, N.J.,opened last month it marked the return of the Jefferson Trust Bank Building to its original architectural design and the revitalization of the city's southwest quadrant. West Bank Construction Corporation, the development company responsible for the Jefferson Trust renovation, recently started construction on a residential project to be situated to the rear of the restored bank building, which now holds commercial space and a civic center.