In writing The Man Who Lived Underground I tried to stress that phase of my grandmother’s life, her religious life, that intrigued me above all else, that queer form of social distance coupled with an abstract love for everybody, the ability to hurl a skillet at me if she found me trying to read something and yet working herself to death to keep food in my stomach. I tried to express all of this in terms of Fred Daniels’s complete and utter forgetfulness of his wife, a woman who meant everything to him when he was living a normal life. But the moment these ideas begin to well up in him, she is forgotten. Take it as an indictment of religion if you want to, but I think the theme has been hinted at before in Russian literature, especially in observations that Gorky made about the religious man who never wanted to aid the folks who lived next door but who wanted to help everybody at once and change everything.

The last theme—and some might say the most important: I don’t know what value it has—I tried to weave into the book, or one might say the last angle I tried to weave into the book, stems from something purely personal. I shall not name any names nor give any dates or facts relating to geographical locations. I can only report that I know how it feels to be accused without cause, because once in my life I was accused without cause. And when you are a member of a minority group, or maybe I should put it this way, say, a member of a minority political party and you are suddenly and violently accused of holding notions you’ve never held, of having done something you’ve never dreamed of, I can tell you that it is one of the most agonizing, devastating, blasting, and brutal experiences conceivable. Fred Daniels’s feeling of being accused without cause was woven out of my memories of having been accused without cause.

My memory of a period of two years in my life when many people looked at me from day to day and suspected me of having done something dreadful, having uttered dreadful political notions about certain things, taught me how to depict those feelings in The Man Who Lived Underground. There is something fascinating about how an innocent man reacts when a false accusation is launched against him. Looking back now upon my own reactions, remembering many people with whom I’ve talked who have had similar accusations launched against them, I can say that it reveals startling quirks of character and action. I have the feeling that the branding of an innocent has the knack of uncovering something about the very nature of life as a whole. If a man has committed a murder and you accuse him of such, I don’t think he will generally act very violently. But if you accuse a man of something that he did not do, his behavior will be utterly unpredictable. It has the power of upsetting his entire way of life, coloring his feelings about people for a lifetime, and sowing the seeds of distrust so deep that they will grow and bear fruit for years afterwards.