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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do foxes represent in the adage that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"?
(a) Political calculations.
(b) Abstractions.
(c) The concreteness of experience.
(d) Society.

2. What as Alexander Herzen's employment?
(a) He was a famous playwright.
(b) He was an education minister.
(c) He was a censor in the government.
(d) He was an effective publicist.

3. What was the dominant philosophical movement of the second quarter of the nineteenth century in Russia?
(a) American Pragmatism.
(b) German Romanticism.
(c) American Transcendentalism.
(d) English Humanism.

4. What does Berlin say was the "French" attitude toward the arts?
(a) Artists are the saviors and redeemers of culture.
(b) Moral faults in the artist do not affect the artwork.
(c) Artists are only legitimate if they are bohemian: sloppy and irresponsible.
(d) Artists are prophets whose lives are instructive to the masses.

5. According to Berlin, what did Tolstoy have the greatest faith in?
(a) Individual experience.
(b) Divine causes.
(c) Nations.
(d) History.

6. What popular idea did Herzen disagree with?
(a) Herzen disagreed with the notion of state power as a justification for violence.
(b) Herzen disagreed with the notion that peasants deserve representation in government.
(c) Herzen disagreed with the notion of individual freedom.
(d) Herzen disagreed with the notion of a pattern in historical events.

7. What conspiracy against the Tsar did the censorship program discover?
(a) The Decembrists.
(b) The Molotov anarchists.
(c) The Petrashevsky Circle.
(d) The Moscow threat.

8. What was Hegel's appeal to Russian students?
(a) His quasi-religious philosophy gave atheistic students something they could believe in.
(b) His idealism seemed like an escape from the squalor of Russia.
(c) His world spirit seemed to prophesy the Russian Revolution.
(d) His theory of history seemed to predict Russian nationalism.

9. What insight did Herzen value in the thinkers who influenced him?
(a) He liked the concept of a clocklike divinity and an ordered universe.
(b) He liked the notion of a godless world motivated by individual actions.
(c) He liked the idea of a spiritual core to human society.
(d) He liked the idea of a total divinity that determined every detail of the universe.

10. What idea captured the imagination of the Russian intelligentsia?
(a) The jingoistic notion that the soul of a people is visible in its arts and industry.
(b) The idea of racial purity and positive eugenics.
(c) The Romantic notion that each human society has an organic unity.
(d) The pragmatic notion that industrial development requires the scientific application of social theories.

11. Which figure was prominent in the founding of the Russian Intelligentsia?
(a) Fyodor Dostoevsky.
(b) Ivan Turgenev.
(c) Leo Tolstoy.
(d) Alexander Pushkin.

12. What forces dominated Herzen's world?
(a) English humanism.
(b) French and German romanticism.
(c) Roman republicanism.
(d) American pragmatism.

13. What was the result of Russia's "moral quarantine"?
(a) Ethnic cleansing of Tartars.
(b) A decrease in censorship.
(c) Intense Slavophilia.
(d) A renaissance in Russian literature.

14. What limitations did Tolstoy see as hindering human beings, according to Berlin?
(a) They can never see life through each other's eyes.
(b) They cannot know all the influences that affect a moment.
(c) They remain divine creatures, even though they live earthly experiences.
(d) They cannot know the divine mind.

15. What effect did German Romanticism have on Russian students?
(a) It demanded a commitment to social and national causes.
(b) It made them dissolute and morally bankrupt.
(c) It made them hungry for violent rebellion and abrupt social change.
(d) It made them resentful of the social distinctions they inherited with their culture.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was the relationship between literature and politics in mid-nineteenth century Russia?

2. Which thinker affected Herzen?

3. How did the epoch that followed the Tsar's acts in the wake of the Decembrist Rebellions end?

4. Who was the Tsar following the Decembrist rebellion?

5. What events proved the limitation Tolstoy described?

(see the answer keys)

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