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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. What did Herzen believe was the "goal" of life?

2. What group was Herzen part of in university?

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

4. What European doctrine did Herzen deplore?

5. What term of contempt did Tolstoy use for writing he disliked?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What course of action did Tolstoy advocate for intellectuals?

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

4. What was Herzen's early activist career like?

5. What was Tolstoy's education like?

6. Describe Russian populism as a movement.

7. Describe Belinsky's background and biography.

8. Where did Alexander Herzen come from?

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

10. What does the term "superfluous men" mean in Russian literature?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What cultural factors made the Russian populists so popular at first and then so ineffective? Why were populist leaders so out of touch that when populists went to the communes in 1874, the peasants rebuffed them whose organization they idealized?

Essay Topic 2

Research essay: Who inherited the legacy of the thinkers Berlin profiled? How did the Russian Revolution transform the ideas of the 19th-century Russian writers? Where was Hegel in the Russian Revolution?

Essay Topic 3

What are Berlin's main concerns as a biographer? Is he telling the stories of the lives of the writers, or the development of the ideas they lived by? Is he telling individual lives, or facets of the life of a culture? Is Berlin a fox or a hedgehog by temperament?

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This section contains 706 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample