“The heat in the street was terrible and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer — all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture.”
That’s Fedor Dostoesvsky, setting the stage for murderous antics in Crime and Punishment in 1866. It only sounds like he’s talking about summer 2011.