Little flame snuffed out by Solzhenitsyn: Moscow's tragic tale of a love grown cold

AS ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn makes his way slowly across Siberia by train, a sad, almost blind woman of 75 tracks his progress from a dark apartment on Leninsky Prospekt in south Moscow, tuning into radio and television for news of the writer who used to call her 'my beloved, glorious little flame'.

Natalia Reshetovskaya is the wife Solzhenitsyn left behind, the partner and confidante who helped to nurse One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich into print in 1962 and who, a decade later, took the secret photographs which, once smuggled out of Russia to the west, would be printed in book form as The Gulag Archipelago.

'I never doubted he would come back,' she says over coffee and chocolate cake in her front room. 'I feel the same way now as when he was my husband. My feelings have not changed. Never mind how he behaved. Sometimes I feel sorry for him. I'm trying to be calm.' But she concedes: 'It was easier when he was far away.'

The couple last met at Moscow's Kazan railway station in late 1973, the year Solzhenitsyn dumped her for an assistant two decades his - and her - junior, only months before the KGB hustled him on to an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt.

'We parted. He kissed my hand, and that was it.' They have exchanged only occasional - and usually poisonous - notes since their rendezvous at the railway station but Ms Reshetovskaya clings to their lost partnership: 'I still have this feeling he is my husband. It will never leave me.'

She first met Solzhenitsyn in 1936 in Riazan, 125 miles south-east of Moscow. She was studying chemistry, he mathematics. They married in 1940. 'He was a real Leninist then. He saw Stalin's mistakes but worshipped Lenin until they sent him to prison. He was so proud that revolution had happened here in Russia.'

Solzhenitsyn and his supporters in the world of Russian letters want nothing to do with Reshetovskaya. She has no place in the cult of the Nobel prize laureate's genius. She has been either air-brushed from memory or heaped with abuse, accused of collaboration with the KGB, infidelity and worse.

But, as she monitors her ex- husband's homecoming after 20 years exile, she claims to feel a participant not a spectator: 'This is my life. It goes on.'

Their marriage was childless but it did produce what are considered to be Solzhenitsyn's greatest works.

Her third floor apartment is cluttered with Solzhenitsyn memorabilia: an oil painting of the young writer looking more like James Dean than an Old Testament prophet; folders filled with the letters he wrote regularly from the front during World War Two and then twice a year from labour camps in Kazakhstan; albums stuffed with pictures of holidays together and the tiny dacha outside Moscow where they hosted dissidents and prepared plates of The Gulag Archipelago.

On a tape-player, she plays a scratchy recording of a poetry and piano duet: Solzhenitsyn reading from a collection of private love poems, while she plays a mournful Chopin prelude.

Failing eyesight prevents her from reading the papers but, with the help of friends and a magnifying glass, she still scrutinises everything they write about her ex-husband as he progresses from Vladivostok to Moscow aboard a carriage on the Trans-Siberian railway.

While insisting that she shared the most productive period of Solzhenitsyn's life, she now devotes part of each day to The Red Wheel, the mammoth 7,000-page project he finished with the help of his second wife, also called Natalia, in a farmhouse in Vermont. Unable to read the text, she is painstakingly working her way through dozens of tapes.

'He has not really left me. I'm in this book,' says Ms Reshetovskaya, who sees herself as the model for one of its characters. She claims to have helped plant the seed for the work: 'The idea first came to him when he was, let us say, not yet indifferent to me.'

Her obsession is unrequited. In the early 1980s, Solzhenitsyn sent medicine and money when he heard his ex-wife had cancer, the disease that had almost killed him three decades earlier. Otherwise, he prefers to forget. Aiding the amnesia, says Ms Reshetovskaya, is the coincidence that she and the current wife share the same name. 'He likes to pretend there is only one Natalia.'

The second Natalia accompanied Solzhenitsyn to Vladivostok two weeks ago, along with their youngest son, Stepan. Waiting on the tarmac to meet them was Yermolai, their oldest son. They seem a close and happy family. Ms Reshetovskaya could make out just enough from the blurred images on her television screen to judge her ex-husband in fine health.

Orchestrating a campaign to discredit her has been Solzhenitsyn himself. In an angry memoir, The Oak and the Calf, he accuses her of snitching to the KGB and staging their last meeting at the Kazan railway station to try and entrap him. Elsewhere it is recalled how she took up with another man during her husband's eight-year stint in Stalin's gulag and lied about the liaison.

Ms Reshetovskaya gave as good as she got. She pleads guilty to unfaithfulness but has letters showing how Solzhenitsyn forgave her and begged her to come back to him after his release from the camps. Others suggest Solzhenitsyn made his own less than heroic compromises with Soviet authorities. Accusations that she betrayed him are countered with details of his indiscretions. Their great love became an ugly and often public feud.

She refers to Solzhenitsyn's infidelities as 'the dramas' - first with a Leningrad lecturer in the mid-Sixties and then at the end of the decade with the woman who would take her place, a youthful mathematician who had joined her husband's circle as a part-time secretary. She got pregnant and Solzhenitsyn demanded a divorce. 'The child became more important to him than his creative work,' she sniffs. 'He is impulsive. He had to sacrifice something. I was the sacrifice.'

After he left Russia with his new wife and family, Ms Reshetovskaya published memoirs with Novosti, an official Soviet imprint, and spiced them with unflattering titbits about life with the greatest Russian writer of the century.

There is no evidence that she knowingly assisted the KGB, though her memoirs enjoyed the blessing of Soviet authorities. In so far as they blemished the image of Solzhenitsyn as an icon of impeccable moral rectitude they served Soviet interests. Her only contact with the KGB, she says, was when a black Volga took her to meet a security officer staying at a Riazan hotel in 1973: 'He (Solzhenitsyn) was Public Enemy Number One so of course they followed what I was doing.'

A charge that she led the KGB to a secret draft copy of The Gulag Archipelago in Leningrad is now generally discounted as the product of Solzhenitsyn's guilty conscience or suspicious imagination. 'I made all the film plates,' she says. 'My finger prints were on them. I risked my own freedom for this. I never told anyone. But he is the great authority. Who am I? If he says something everybody listens and thinks it must be true. Why should they listen to me?'

At the same time, her respect for Solzhenitsyn is still immense. She speaks his name with awe, reading significance into the fact that it includes all the letters needed to write the Russian word for sun, solntse. 'He has intuition, an ability to predict. He can see the future.'

She hopes this future will include a visit to Leninsky Prospekt to see her. 'Someone has to explain to him. He left me. I did not leave him. He blames me. This is the paradox.'

Even if he never pays a call, she is sure he will never really belong to anyone else either. 'He will not join anyone. He will play a very original role. He will be himself.'

(Photographs omitted)