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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was the name of the committee in charge of government censorship?
(a) The Homeland Purity Committee.
(b) The Decembrist Committee.
(c) The Comintern.
(d) The Second of April Committee.

2. How did Herzen see human society?
(a) Herzen saw human society as a spiritual reality in itself.
(b) Herzen saw human society as the sum total of each individual's experiences.
(c) Herzen saw human society as the victim of industrial expansion.
(d) Herzen saw human society as a number of connected--or disconnected--individuals.

3. What is the stereotype of the Russian intellectual?
(a) Romantic and progressive.
(b) Gloomy and pessimistic.
(c) Reform-minded and logical.
(d) Crabby and self-defeating.

4. How did censorship system work?
(a) It was a double censorship system.
(b) It relied on writers' self-censorship.
(c) It used paid informers to keep banned books from being written.
(d) It forced authors to publically recant having written banned books.

5. What features of European culture were missing in Russia in the 1830s and 40s?
(a) Inherited aristocracy.
(b) Industrial cities.
(c) Organized opposition parties, a middle class.
(d) Artists and bohemians.

6. Who was the Tsar following the Decembrist rebellion?
(a) Charles.
(b) Nicholas I.
(c) Nicholas II.
(d) Herzen.

7. Whose writing was Russia "intellectually dependent" upon?
(a) Fichte and Schelling.
(b) Flaubert and Rousseau.
(c) Hume and Locke.
(d) Plato and Plotinus.

8. What does Berlin say is underestimated in Tolstoy's legacy?
(a) His moral vision.
(b) His detailed descriptions.
(c) His acute social commentary.
(d) His philosophy of history.

9. When did the Decembrist rebellion take place?
(a) 1809.
(b) 1817
(c) 1848.
(d) 1825.

10. What was Bakunin's relationship with Herzen?
(a) Herzen was susceptible to Bakunin's improvident optimism.
(b) Herzen was the better intellectual.
(c) Bakunin was inspired by Herzen's experience.
(d) Bakunin learned his theories under Herzen's tutelage.

11. How did the Tsar's political stance change after the Decembrist rebellion?
(a) He stepped down.
(b) He adopted a series of reforms.
(c) He moved away from reform.
(d) He abandoned tradition.

12. What writer supported the Tsar's acts?
(a) Alexander Pushkin.
(b) Nikolai Gogol.
(c) Fyodor Dostoevsky.
(d) Leo Tolstoy.

13. How did the writer who supported the Tsar present the Tsar's acts?
(a) He denounced the Tsar's opponents.
(b) He justified the aristocracy's use of violence.
(c) He proclaimed the natural rights of man.
(d) He presented even serfdom as divinely ordained.

14. What dictum of Schelling's represented the Russian literary scene in the nineteenth century?
(a) The arts are the last thing to change in a culture.
(b) Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
(c) Idealism lives in literature but grows old and dies in prison.
(d) Writers capture the times better than sociologists do.

15. Where did de Maistre express his views?
(a) In the streets of Moscow.
(b) In the church.
(c) In books and letters.
(d) In the Tsar's court.

Short Answer Questions

1. What movement was responsible for bringing politics into literature in mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature?

2. Which figure was prominent in the founding of the Russian Intelligentsia?

3. What did the Tsar see himself as defending for his country?

4. How does Berlin describe Herzen's importance?

5. Who was Mikhail Bakunin's mentor?

(see the answer keys)

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