MOSCOW — Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s wife on Thursday presented the initial three volumes of the first full collection of his works to be published in Russia, a country still struggling with the legacy of the oppressive era he documented.It was a cherished moment for the aging Nobel laureate, who has been through prison camps and exile and, Natalya Solzhenitsyn said, feels the “draining of the life force” as his 88th birthday approaches. He was not at the presentation and his wife did not elaborate on his health.

“Alexander Isayevich told me that the French have a saying: ‘Nothing comes too late for he who is able to wait,”’ Mrs. Solzhenitsyn said.

With financial support from a state-owned bank, the 30-volume project to be completed in four years marks the latest twist in what the reclusive author’s wife called the “very dramatic fate of Solzhenitsyn’s books,” which helped reveal the brutality of the Soviet system and dictator Josef Stalin’s labour camps.

Natalya Solzhenitsyn, who has nurtured her husband’s work and protected his privacy, recounted how that drama began on November 18, 1936 — 70 years ago on Saturday — when she said Solzhenitsyn, a first-year university student, conceived what eventually became “The Red Wheel.” Solzhenitsyn finished the ten-volume saga about the Russian Revolution in 1990 and considers it his most important work.

He was arrested for criticising Stalin in a letter he wrote during World War II, during which he served as a front-line artillery captain, and spent a decade in a labor camp and internal exile.

He drew on his ordeal in the short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published in 1962 during a backlash against Stalin. But soon after, his writing was suppressed in the Soviet Union. Subsequent works — including “The Gulag Archipelago” (1973-78) — were written in secret and only published abroad.

At that time, his wife recalled, “hundreds of typewriters across the country — maybe more, nobody was counting — pounded out” underground versions, known as samizdat, of works like “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward.”

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, and four years later was expelled from the Soviet Union. The only previous major collection of his works, in 20 volumes, was published in Paris during the years he spent in Vermont.

The new collection is to comprise those works and others, as well as material that has never been published — including a diary he wrote during the quarter-century that he worked on “The Red Wheel,” his wife said.

The three volumes presented Thursday include one book of stories and “August 1914,” the two-volume first part of “The Red Wheel.”

The full collection in Russian will not contain unfinished works, alternate versions and letters, said Mrs. Solzhenitsyn, who is its editor. There were no known plans to publish the collection in English.

The former dissident returned to Russia in 1994, taking a train across the country and criticising the corruption and poverty of post-Soviet Russia. He has kept a lower profile in recent years, giving few interviews and issuing few public statements.

His conservative nationalist views have aligned him with President Vladimir Putin, who bills his years in office as a period of recovery following the economic troubles, disorder and weakness on the world stage that Russia suffered after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

In rare public remarks, Solzhenitsyn has praised Putin despite the president’s KGB background. But his wife dismissed the idea of a connection between Solzhenitsyn’s political views and the collection’s publication with funding from the state-owned bank VTB.

Boris Pasternak, director of the collection’s publisher Vremya, said the bank had contributed $100,000 and Vremya expected eventually to profit from the enterprise as demand would require a significant increase over the initial print run of just 3,000.

VTB spokeswoman Yevgeniya Mamsurova also denied any political undertones and said the bank believed the project will burnish its reputation.

While Solzhenitsyn’s influence has waned since the Soviet collapse, his wife said interest in his books picked up toward the end of the 1990s. But she said he was still surprised by the offer to publish the current collection.

After returning to Russia, Solzhenitsyn published two books “Russia in Collapse” and “The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century” that chronicled the greed, corruption, conspicuous consumption in the years following the Soviet collapse. In 2001, he brought out “Two Hundred Years Together,” a 500-page tome on Russian-Jewish relations, which sparked new criticism from some who have long accused the writer of anti-Semitism.

Solzhenitsyn keeps the initial volumes from the collection on his table. “He caresses them, he loves them,” but he does not believe he will live to see the final volume’s expected publication in 2010, his wife said.

While he attentively follows developments in Russia, his “very frail” health means he can do so only as a spectator, she added. “He is experiencing a certain draining of the life force.”

Solzhenitsyn said as much in a brief author’s note to the first volume, writing that the collection “will include everything I have written — in my adult life, after my youth. And its publication will continue after my death.”