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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. Which thinker saw progress in the growth of national cultures?

2. What idea captured the imagination of the Russian intelligentsia?

3. What did the Russian Intelligentsia invent?

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

5. What social movement did the Russian Intelligentsia contribute to?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What example does Tolstoy use to explain why human beings cannot know all the actions and causes that affect their experiences?

3. Where in Europe were there revolutions in 1848?

4. What influence did censors have on Russian intellectuals and literature?

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

6. What problems did Herzen have with Hegelian philosophy?

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

8. What do foxes and hedgehogs represent in Archilochus' adage, and how does Berlin apply the distinction to Russian thinkers?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What are Berlin's main concerns as a biographer? Is he telling the stories of the lives of the writers, or the development of the ideas they lived by? Is he telling individual lives, or facets of the life of a culture? Is Berlin a fox or a hedgehog by temperament?

Essay Topic 2

What are the strengths of the kind of biography Berlin is practicing here? What are the limitations? What does Berlin show effectively? What questions remain unaddressed, or unresolved?

Essay Topic 3

What cultural factors made the Russian populists so popular at first and then so ineffective? Why were populist leaders so out of touch that when populists went to the communes in 1874, the peasants rebuffed them whose organization they idealized?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 658 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample