Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the soul of man, and privatio boni.

The literary turn of William Writes continues with this excerpt from an article published in The London Times, in 1913, and available to you at Bartleby:

“…Dostoevsky needs no illusion of certainty. and gives none. He had a faith independent of happiness and even of the state of his own soul. Life indeed had poured unhappiness upon him, so that he knew the worst of it from his own experience; yet we can tell from his books that he knew also a peace of thought compared with which all his own miseries were unreal to him. In that he differs from Tolstoy, who saw this peace of thought in the distance and could not reach it. Tolstoy therefore conceived of life as an inevitable discord between will and conviction, and tried to impose the impossible on mankind as he tried to impose it upon himself, judging them with the severity of his self-judgments. His books are full of his own pursuit of certainty and his own half-failure and half-success. He still makes happiness the test, even though he feels that the noblest of men cannot attain to it; for his own happiness was caused by the conflict in his mind between will and conviction. But in Dostoevsky this conflict had ceased. He was not happy, but he was not born by the desire for happiness; nor did he test his own soul or the souls of others by their happiness or unhappiness. His faith in the soul was so great that he saw it independent of circumstance, and almost independent of its own manifestation in action. For in these manifestations there is always the alloy of circumstance, or the passions of the flesh, or of good or evil fortune; and he tried to see the soul free of this. He did not judge men by their diversities which outward things seemed to impose on them. For him the soul itself was more real than all these diversities, and they only interested him for their power of revealing or obscuring it. Therefore his object in his novels is to reveal the soul, not to pass any judgements upon men, nor to tell us how they fare in this world; and this object makes his peculiar method. He does not try to show us souls free from their bodies or free from circumstance, for to do that would be contrary to his own experience and his own faith. Rather he shows them tormented and mistranslated, even to themselves, but in such a way that we see the reality beyond the torments and the mistranslations.”

First, wouldn't it be amazing if newspapers still published things like this?

I was having a little chat with a friend today about evil as a privation of good, and I think this description of Dostoevsky's approach captures something about it. The characters aren't good in their present state; they are “mistranslated.” Yet there was goodness in the original language, in the original word by which the universe was spoken into being. Like Tolkien's original melody, married by dissonant notes, there is something old and true in all people that we can, by grace, discern.