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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What balance did Herzen strike in his philosophy?
(a) A balance between political engagement and artistic remove.
(b) A balance between revolutionary activities and aristocratic manners.
(c) A balance between living naturally and making art.
(d) A balance between social justice and intellectual skepticism.

2. Whose failures did the leader of the Populists reject?
(a) Herzen's.
(b) Dostoevsky's.
(c) Gogol's.
(d) Bakunin's.

3. Where was Belinsky born?
(a) Moscow.
(b) Berlin.
(c) Finland.
(d) Minsk.

4. What was Tolstoy's opinion about his professors?
(a) Tolstoy believed that they were fostering a revolutionary consciousness in their students.
(b) Tolstoy believed that they contained the wealth of the world between themselves collectively.
(c) Tolstoy believed that they wasted their time on trivialities.
(d) Tolstoy believed that they were undermining the aristocracy.

5. How was Belinsky described by the writers he influenced?
(a) Belinsky was described as the aesthete of his generation.
(b) Belinsky was described as the conscience of his generation.
(c) Belinsky was described as Russia's retrograde conservative.
(d) Belinsky was described as Russia's most optimistic Romantic.

6. When did Vissarion Belinsky die?
(a) 1856.
(b) 1848.
(c) 1862.
(d) 1850.

7. When did Tolstoy's reputation change?
(a) In the late 1880s.
(b) In the mid-1870s.
(c) In the early 1890s.
(d) In the early 1860s.

8. What group was Herzen part of in university?
(a) Herzen belonged to a group of student radicals.
(b) Herzen was one of Turgenev's "superfluous men."
(c) Herzen was one of Belinsky's proteges.
(d) Herzen was part of the Petrachevsky circle.

9. What did Belinsky find in literature?
(a) Vicarious experiences.
(b) Evidence of a national race-life.
(c) Spiritual and emotional "ideas."
(d) Evidence of European superiority.

10. Whom did Belinsky identify as the father of Russian literature?
(a) Pushkin.
(b) Lermontov.
(c) Dostoevsky.
(d) Turgenev.

11. What did Populists do in large scale in 1874?
(a) Publish a manifesto prophesying Communism.
(b) Declare independence from Russia.
(c) Study social organization in peasant communes.
(d) Begin a rebellion in Moscow.

12. What balance did Belinsky strike in his career?
(a) Belinsky's life balanced between aristocracy and rusticity.
(b) Belinsky's life balanced between violence with restraint.
(c) Belinsky's life balanced between progress and conservatism.
(d) Belinsky's life balanced between literature and farming.

13. What native influence affected the Russian Populists?
(a) Russian agricultural practices.
(b) Russian Orthodox traditions.
(c) The gloom of Russian philosophy.
(d) Serfdom.

14. Who was the thinker Tolstoy agreed with most?
(a) Rousseau.
(b) Mazzini.
(c) Pestalozzi.
(d) Marcus Aurelius.

15. Where was Herzen educated?
(a) The University of Moscow.
(b) London.
(c) Berlin.
(d) Petersburg.

Short Answer Questions

1. What qualities did the characters based on Belinsky possess?

2. What were the Russian Populists opposed to?

3. How did Belinsky make a living?

4. What interaction did Tolstoy have with the radical Dobrolyubov?

5. What did Turgenev try to do with the novel he published five years after Fathers and Children?

(see the answer keys)

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