The soul is healed by being with children.

The line expresses a recurring Dostoyevskian conviction: contact with childlike innocence can soften spiritual sickness—pride, cynicism, guilt, and despair—and reopen a person to compassion. In his fiction, children often function as moral touchstones whose vulnerability exposes the cruelty or self-deception of adults, while also offering a possibility of redemption through tenderness and responsibility. Read this way, “healed” does not mean cured of suffering but restored to moral perception: the adult soul, hardened by experience and sin, is reawakened by the uncalculated trust and immediacy children embody. The sentiment aligns with Dostoyevsky’s broader religious-ethical emphasis on humility and love as the path out of alienation.