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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. After Cambridge, how is Nabokov's life?
(a) A life of financial success and artistic destitution.
(b) A similar life to that in Russia.
(c) A middle-class life.
(d) A life of financial destitution and intellectual opulence.

2. What does he describe with obvious revelry?
(a) The feeling of selfless isolation that such prolonged expenditures of concentration engenders.
(b) The feeling of power and excertion in playing a game of lawn tennis with family and friends.
(c) The feeling of freedom in hunting and capturing a new species of butterfly.
(d) The feeling of isolation and contentment when writing a work of poetry.

3. Though he is an excellent teacher to the Nabokov boys, what does Lenski find difficult?
(a) Teaching the boys mathematics.
(b) Making his lessons interesting.
(c) Teaching the boys to be well-behaved.
(d) His own studies.

4. Why is the relationship between Kirill, the younger brother, and Nabokov more like that of distant friends?
(a) They do not get along.
(b) They have such different personalities.
(c) Due to Kirill being given up for adoption.
(d) Due to the large gap in their ages.

5. Nabokov develops a fondness for what?
(a) Poetry.
(b) Butterflies.
(c) Lawn tennis.
(d) Composing chess problems.

6. What happens, when winter comes, to their love affair?
(a) It ends.
(b) It has to endure a life of closer scrutiny.
(c) It comes out in the open.
(d) It fades to nothing.

7. What does Vladimir continue to do while in exile in Berlin?
(a) Write about human rights.
(b) Take his family to France for the summers.
(c) Own property in Russia.
(d) Work for the Russian government.

8. What is the subject of this chapter?
(a) Nabokov's tutor, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.
(b) Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.
(c) Nabokov's brother, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.
(d) Nabokov's uncle, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.

9. What earns Vladimir several rebukes from the Tsarist government?
(a) His tardiness to meetings.
(b) His refusal to be on this council.
(c) His increasing outspokenness about human rights.
(d) His teasing of the Tsarina.

10. His other brother, Sergey, is only a year younger than Nabokov. The two are raised together, but what makes them different?
(a) They have different tutors.
(b) They have different hair color.
(c) They have different fathers.
(d) They have disparate interests.

11. Vladimir is raised by his own share of governesses and tutors but where does he go at the age of 13?
(a) Berkshire Boys Academy.
(b) St. Petersburg Academy.
(c) Poly Preparatory.
(d) The Gymnasium.

12. Who dies young of a heart ailment?
(a) The schoolmaster.
(b) A Ukrainian mathematician.
(c) A Polish tutor.
(d) A Greek spelling tutor.

13. What does Nabokov confess about Yuri and himself?
(a) The "slums of sex" were unknown to both of them.
(b) They wish they had girlfriends.
(c) The devastation of war is new to them.
(d) They know nothing about America.

14. What happens to Yuri in northern Crimea?
(a) He is married.
(b) He is killed.
(c) He is captured.
(d) He converts to Catholicism.

15. What does the headstrong Yuri in later life introduce to Nabokov?
(a) Butterflies.
(b) The Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid.
(c) Poetry.
(d) The French language.

Short Answer Questions

1. What do both Vladimir's writings on technical matters as well as philosophical have in common?

2. Why does she hand him a hand mirror?

3. Who does Nabokov meet at the age of sixteen?

4. Why is Lenski working as a tutor?

5. To where do the boys win scholarships?

(see the answer keys)

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