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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 conspiracy against the Tsar did the censorship program discover?

2. How was the period that followed the Tsar's acts known?

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

4. What did the Russian Intelligentsia invent?

5. Whose writing was Russia "intellectually dependent" upon?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What did Russian students learn in German universities?

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

4. In what ways does Berlin see Tolstoy's experience as representative of Russian culture?

5. What saying of Schelling's represents the relationship of artists to their times in Russian ideology of the mid-nineteenth century?

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

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

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

9. Where in Europe were there revolutions in 1848?

10. Describe the difference between progressive and reactionary Romanticism.

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

What part did women play in the lives of the thinkers Berlin describes? Pick one or two authors or thinkers, and describe the influence the women in their lives had on their work.

Essay Topic 3

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?

(see the answer keys)

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