In the classic Fyodor Dostoevsky novel Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov commits the murders that shape the book in the midst of a sweltering St. Petersburg summer. In the words of Dostoevsky, “It was terribly hot out, and moreover it was close, crowded; lime, scaffolding, bricks, dust everywhere, and that special summer stench known so well to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a summer house.”
Dostoevsky’s description of St. Petersburg’s repressive heat came to mind while reading a front page Washington Post story last week with the headline “2023 is declared the hottest year on record.” To read about the weather nowadays is to read it in dramatic fashion, about “blistering surface temperatures” and other horrors meant to give the impression that brutal heat is a thoroughly modern concept. Dostoevsky would surely be amused.
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