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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 part of Tolstoy's legacy do critics praise?

2. What was Tolstoy's relationship with Joseph de Maistre?

3. What was Hegel's appeal to Russian students?

4. What does Berlin say Tolstoy felt guilty about?

5. How does Berlin describe the state of Russian culture in the mid-1800s?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe the difference between progressive and reactionary Romanticism.

2. How did the revolutions of 1848 affect western European intellectuals and Russians differently?

3. Whose writings had Russian intellectuals and writers primarily been influenced by?

4. Which Russian intellectuals did Pavel Annenkov describe in his memoirs?

5. What conspiracy group did the Second of April Committee unveil, and what was the result of the trial?

6. What was the heart of the Romantic notion that held the Russian intelligentsia in Germany's influence?

7. What was Annenkov's role in the circle of Russian Intelligentsia?

8. What problems did Herzen have with Hegelian philosophy?

9. What was Russia's cultural situation in the 1830s and 40s?

10. Why, according to Berlin, did Tolstoy resist subscribing to a totalizing theory of history?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Berlin uses the adage of the fox and the hedgehog to describe Tolstoy as a materialist who saw the value of being an idealist, but in Tolstoy's works, the authorial eye could only see the grand designs, never by the characters. Which characters tried to see the design behind events? Which authors did not? Which authors were successful?

Essay Topic 2

How did authors resist the pitfalls of political engagement? Choose three authors or critics and describe their strategies for refusing to engage with the political tensions of their day.

Essay Topic 3

Why was Russian culture so ripe for revolution and transformation? What traits of inherited Russian culture made it so receptive to external ideas such as Hegel's ideas about history or Rousseau's ideas about the innocence of children?

(see the answer keys)

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