Civic Grief, Social Injustice, Dostoevsky

He used to fall regularly, three or four times a year, into a state known  among us as ‘civic grief’ * - that is simply a fit of spleen, but our esteemed Varvara Petrovna liked the expression. Later on, besides civic grief, he also began falling into champagne; but the alert Varvara Petrovna guarded him all his life against all trivial inclinations.

[* The phrase ‘civic grief’, meaning an acute suffering over social ills and inequities, was widely used in the Russia of the 1860s; the disease itself became fashionable in Petersburg, where the deaths of some high-school students and cadets were even ascribed to it.]

This and its additional note from the early pages of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons, inspired by the liberal ideology and its progressively radical developments in Russia of the time.