The Works of Plato

in the translation returned to the sick man along with images of the Chinese: he saw in a dream Li Hung-chang, who spoke to him in Greek:

Vladimir Sergeyevich did not do any serious work, especially one as large as the undertaken translation, without a deep conviction of the importance and usefulness of his task. As with other works, he hurried with this translation, considering himself as if called to do it. He says in the preface to the first volume that he seemed to hear the familiar voice of the late Fet Afanasy Fet, a prominent Russian poet calling him to the "destined" labor.

And he was not mistaken in this calling, although death prevented him from continuing the work he had begun. It is unlikely that anyone else, besides him, could have truly "given Plato to Russian literature." The excellent sketches, introductory and concluding arguments, and translation drafts provided in the first volume can partially confirm this. But what makes us think of this most of all is that remarkable congeniality? which drew our philosopher to Plato?, and which probably caused the late? Fet? to wish that he, specifically, would translate Plato.

An amazing combination of philosophical creativity with the greatest mastery? of language?, of mystical speculation with the freest, boldest, and crushing? dialectics, a comprehensive philosophical interest, a deep philosophical-aesthetic? view of nature, faith that the ideal world is not only real but also ought to be, and a striving to realize this better world on earth, in human society — all these traits that distinguish Plato are directly combined in V. Solovyov as well. Both thinkers are idealists at the very root of their spiritual being, idealists by spirit and, one might say, by temperament — no one understood the meaning of Plato's "eros" more deeply than Solovyov, as a force that "in itself removes, at least subjectively, the unconditional boundary between two worlds" (I, 27). In both philosophers, an abstract or pessimistic idealism, flowing from the awareness of the deep opposition of the ideal to the base reality, is combined

*) See below page 344 fol. Crito 44 A — B.