Typically, it was Natalia Solzhenitsyn who has given the latest insight into her husband, Aleksandr. At 89, he is working frantically to complete the 30 volumes of his collected works, she says. He is frail, can barely walk and hasn't left his Moscow house for five years, but he continues to write, determined to continue to disseminate his views on repression in the Soviet Union.

Famously reclusive, Russia's greatest living novelist has only engaged with the media on his own terms and has often used his family as a conduit. He must know that he is nothing without public attention, but his instinct has always been to live within his work and to have a public presence only for his words; he has assiduously avoided the cult of personality that could so easily have engulfed him after his Nobel Literature Prize in 1970. This leaves us knowing everything about his loathing of communism and his distaste for Western secularism and materialism, and little about him as a man, other than his taste for gloom and his autocracy. In photographs he looks dour, Victorian almost, a throwback to an era when ideas were respected for their intellectual weight rather than marketing potential.

He was born in Kislovodsk, six months after his father, an army officer, was killed in a hunting accident. He was decorated for his own service as a Red Army captain in the Second World War but was soon accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and by July 1945 he had been sentenced to eight years in a labour camp.

His experiences gave him the material for his writing. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first of his unremittingly doom-ridden but powerful works, and The Gulag Archipelago told of his time in labour camps under Stalin; Cancer Ward related to the illness from which he made a full recovery.

He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and spent 18 years living on a fenced 50-acre estate in Cavendish, Vermont. His three sons became Americanised but he refused to embrace American culture and barely learnt to speak English - his wife negotiated with the local community. As a result of his exile, and the banning of his books, a generation of Russians grew up unfamiliar with his work.

He has tried to correct that since 1990, when the Soviet Union was close to collapse and Boris Yeltsin restored his citizenship. He returned, accompanied, bizarrely, by a BBC film crew as he rolled in, through Siberia, on a luxury train and has dedicated his time since to his mission. His wife, 20 years his junior, a gifted mathematician and a former Olympic rower, remains the only person he trusts to type and edit his work, and the first volumes have already been published. Russia is reading him again, she says with evident satisfaction, and that is clearly her husband's answer to those who regard him as yesterday's man.

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