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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. Who wrote the memoir titled "The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia"?

2. What forces dominated Herzen's world?

3. How did the Tsar's political stance change after the Decembrist rebellion?

4. What had been the outcome of the European states' revolution?

5. What was de Maistre's position?

Short Essay Questions

1. What did "intelligentsia" mean in Russia, where the term was coined?

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

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

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

5. Describe the difference between Herzen and Bakunin's personalities.

6. What did Nicholas Stankevich find attractive in Hegel's theories?

7. How did Tsar Nicholas respond to the European revolutions of 1848?

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

9. Who was Joseph de Maistre and what ideas did Tolstoy share with him?

10. How did Bakunin differ from Stankevich in his application of Hegelian ideas?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the state of radicalism in Western thought today? Where radicalism playing out, the way French and German radicalism is was playing out in Russia starting in the 1830s? Make a case for a current conflict as evidence of a modern cultural clash/reform/transformation.

Essay Topic 2

Where else in the modern world are people playing out this tension between progress on one hand and nationalism or localism, on the other? How does the Russian example--of revolutionaries trying to preserve Russian social structures in the face of industrial or modern reforms--relate to the modern example?

Essay Topic 3

How accurate is the stereotype of the Russian intellectual as gloomy and pessimistic? Why was that stereotype conceived, and what cultural factors would induce an intellectual to be gloomy and pessimistic? In what cases was the stereotype grossly inaccurate?

(see the answer keys)

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