The combination of inner readiness and inaction is exhausting and difficult to bear. "Waiting is perceived as inner tension, meaningless idleness, formless boredom, an exercise of power, and a loss of precious time — rarely as a welcome postponement or a productive pause." Yet we are not powerless in the passivity of waiting.
I keep returning to a photograph I never took. It exists only as a residue of memory: a summer afternoon in the apartment my family shared in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, before we migrated. I stepped outside for a moment and looked into the steppe. It was one of those views that offers no horizon in the usual sense — the land simply continued, flat and unhurried, until it became sky. The steppe does not invite you to move through it; it invites you to remain. To be still inside your own looking. I was too young then to have a name for what that stillness produced in me, but I know now that it was something like waiting — not for anything in particular, but as a condition, a posture of the body and the mind that the landscape seemed to require.
That posture is what I think of now when I read about Siberia. About the waiting that happens at the edges of history — at its deliberate margins, where the light is oblique and the clocks may not be running.
Typologically speaking, there are many forms of waiting: forced waiting, vegetative waiting, impatient waiting, enduring and dulled waiting, and, finally, peripheral waiting — the waiting that accumulates in marginalized regions subject to deliberate erasure. This last form interests me most, because it is the kind that historiography has consistently refused to record. It is the waiting that leaves no archive.
This can also be seen in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), where he briefly mentions Siberia — only to explain why he will not say another word about it. Immediately beforehand, he had discussed the exclusion of Africa in exhaustive detail, revealing how historiography since Hegel has been tied to exclusion, division, fragmentation, and repression. The logic is almost too clean: reason admits only what it has already decided to see. Everything else is silence, and the silence is the argument.
One can imagine Dostoevsky's astonishment when, in Siberian exile, he came across Hegel's lines — and his despair upon realizing that his suffering carried no significance in Europe. After four years of forced labor, Dostoevsky was sent in the spring of 1854 to Semipalatinsk in Siberia, into a world that exiled him into non-being. Not death. Something more difficult: irrelevance. The historiographical violence of being placed outside time, outside the movement of Weltgeist, is perhaps more corrosive than physical punishment, because it denies even the grammar of protest. You cannot resist erasure from within a category that does not exist.
In contrast to Hegel's appeal to pure reason, the protagonist in Notes from Underground (1864) responds that reason satisfies only reasonable faculties, whereas life itself possesses dimensions that cannot be captured within historiography. The underground man is not irrational — he is excessively rational, rational to the point of self-destruction, precisely because he knows the rules of the system that has excluded him and cannot stop replaying them. What Dostoevsky found in Siberia was the limit of that system. Having stepped out of European historical time — or rather, having been pushed — he transformed his Siberian experiences into Notes from a Dead House (1860), in which he replaced the dead with the exiled. A substitution that is also a theory: the exiled are the living dead of historiography, present but unrecorded, enduring but not progressing.
In this novel, he depicted Siberia as a hell with all its horrors, yet the European repression seemed just as infernal to him — the repression of mysticism, sanctity, suffering, and death itself, all displaced by the ordinary and the average. Bourgeois time, that smooth and uninterrupted forward motion toward improvement, toward the accumulation of reasonable outcomes: this is what exiles the mystical, the transgressive, the suffering body. Siberia became, paradoxically, a space of surplus interiority — a place where the inner life, denied external form, had to become its own architecture.
Ultimately, Dostoevsky was grateful to fate for his exile. He suffered from it, yet at the same time experienced it as redemption:
What happened to my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart during these four years — I will not say. It would take too long. But the constant turning inward, to which I fled from the bitter reality, bore fruit. Now I have many wishes and hopes of which I had previously known nothing.
This is the paradox that waiting, at its most radical, opens: the self that had been organized around outward motion, productivity, historical significance — stripped of all that, discovers it was also organized around something else. Something that does not require the authorization of Hegel, or Europe, or progress.To make waiting one's own in this way allows for radical encounters with oneself and a withdrawal from permanently goal-oriented activity. Waiting, as a moment of pause, of in-between time and as an empty space, is neither pure passive endurance nor manifest progress: "Rather, it gives rise to a paradoxical situation, to a phenomenon of stillness and development at the same time."
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I think again of that afternoon in Karaganda — itself a city born from a labor camp, the Karlag, where hundreds of thousands were held in conditions not unlike the Siberian exile Dostoevsky described, except without the eventual literary redemption. My family arrived there not as exiles but as deportees, Germans expelled from Ukraine during the Stalin years, deposited in the steppe and told to wait. For permission to leave. For history to turn back around and notice them. They waited decades. The steppe I looked into that summer afternoon was the same steppe that had received them, indifferently, and held them.
What does it mean that I write from that residue — that I carry within me not Hegel's historical subject but the steppe's flat horizon, that particular quality of a landscape that simply continues? Perhaps the peripheral waiting he dismissed and that Dostoevsky survived is not merely the underside of European modernity but its most honest mirror: showing it what it excludes in order to maintain the fiction of its own forward motion.
Or perhaps the waiting itself — the kind that bears fruit without intending to, that turns inward when outward motion is denied — is not a marginal condition at all. Perhaps it is the form that thinking takes when it refuses to be organized by the timelines of power.
What would a historiography look like that began from the steppe, not the archive? From the posture of remaining, not the document of arrival?