Siberian experiences

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.

Typologically speaking, there are many forms of it: forced waiting, vegetative waiting, impatient waiting, enduring and dulled waiting, and, finally, peripheral waiting in marginalized regions subject to erasure. 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.

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. 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. Having stepped out of European historical time, Dostoevsky transformed his Siberian experiences into a book titled Notes from a Dead House (1860), in which he replaced the dead with the exiled. 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. 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.

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”.