Is It Worth It

When Mitya Karamazov is driven away under escort, a young man named Kalganov runs out without his cap and takes Mitya's hand for a moment before the cart moves.

Then he goes back inside, sits in a corner, hides his face in his hands, and cries. The text says he cried "as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty." He cries for a long time.

"What are these people? What can men be after this?"

He is crying for Mitya, whom he almost certainly believes is a murderer.

Kalganov has been present throughout the interrogation. He testified, reluctantly, giving evidence that protected Grushenka but didn't help Mitya much. He is one of those peripheral figures Dostoevsky populates his scenes with—young, basically decent, not significant enough to have his own storyline.

The text says: "Oh, he believed almost without doubt in Mitya's guilt."

He believes Mitya killed his father. He runs out to take his hand anyway, without his cap, in November cold. And then he sits and weeps.

"Is it worth it? Is it worth it?" he exclaims in his grief.

This is not a grief that requires the person grieved for to be innocent. That's what makes it strange and important.

The innocent-person grief is easier to parse. You weep for injustice; the weeping is a protest. Kalganov's weeping isn't a protest. He thinks Mitya did it. He is still—for reasons he couldn't articulate at twenty, in the November cold, watching the cart drive away—devastated.

What is he devastated by?

Maybe by the fact that Mitya is compelling. Not virtuous, not innocent, but vitally, incandescently real in a way that the whole apparatus of law and evidence and prosecution isn't real. The investigation was correct. The evidence is real. And Mitya, who doesn't belong in prison, who is going there anyway, who shouted at his interrogators and fell asleep and woke crying for the unknown person who put a pillow under his head—is more alive than the correct process that is consuming him.

Maybe by the gap between what happened and what will happen to it. The legal system will take this night and reduce it to facts. Facts are real. The facts will be accurate. And they will not contain any of it: the smell of the candles, Mitya's voice, the pillow, the hands behind the back, the thirty-one days of the amulet, the dream of the crying babe, the moment when Grushenka crossed herself before the ikon.

Maybe just by the bell beginning to ring and the cart driving off and the sense that something was ending that should not have ended.

"Is it worth it?" is a question without an answer—not rhetorical, not philosophical. He's twenty years old and he just watched a man he barely knows be taken to prison for his father's murder, and something in his chest broke without his permission, and it doesn't matter whether Mitya did it or not because the grief is happening anyway.

Dostoevsky puts this scene after Mitya's big speech and Nikolay Parfenovitch's careful legalistic closing. Both of those were dignified, professional, composed. Kalganov running out without his cap is not dignified. Kalganov hiding his face in his hands is not composed. He is twenty years old and he is crying like a little boy.

The implication is that the composed closure is not the real ending. The real ending is the uncalculated grief of someone young enough to still feel things before he can decide whether to feel them.

The legal process got everything right. The evidence was real. The witnesses told the truth. The Committal was issued correctly. And a twenty-year-old went to a corner and asked whether it was worth it, meaning: worth being born, worth living in a world that works this way, where being Mitya Karamazov lands you here.

He doesn't get an answer. He sits in the corner for a while and then, presumably, gets up and continues.