January 6, 1985

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.