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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How was Turgenev's novels seen by the Russian government?

2. What allowed the leader of the Populists to lead?

3. How does Berlin describe Belinsky's legacy?

4. Which two thinkers influenced the Russian populists?

5. What program did Tolstoy advocate?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Herzen's relationship with his friends?

2. What balances did Belinsky strike in his social status and identity?

3. Why did Turgenev's character Bazarov inspire such strong responses from audiences?

4. Describe Russian populism as a movement.

5. What was Tolstoy's social life like after graduating from university?

6. According to Berlin, why was Turgenev attacked from both left and right?

7. Who was Nikolay Chernychevsky and what was his role in Russian culture?

8. What was Turgenev's political stance, and how had he formulated it?

9. How was Turgenev's work viewed at the end of his life?

10. Describe Belinsky's background and biography.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Berlin uses the adage of the fox and the hedgehog to describe Tolstoy as a materialist who saw the value of being an idealist, but in Tolstoy's works, the authorial eye could only see the grand designs, never by the characters. Which characters tried to see the design behind events? Which authors did not? Which authors were successful?

Essay Topic 2

How did Berlin's own life and times affect his writing about the writers and activists whose portraits he drew in Russian Thinkers? In what ways might Berlin have been trying to identify ideas that would be useful for him in his own time--after WWII and Viet Nam--in addition to identifying the ideas that motivated the Russian writers, populists, Romantics to try to change Russian culture?

Essay Topic 3

Were literature and philosophy separable from politics in 19th-century Russian literature, or were they simply the meditative and artistic versions of political activity? What was it about the cultural moment of 19th-century Russia that turned philosophy and literature into political questions?

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