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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 policy of Peter the Great's had spawned the intelligentsia?

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

3. What did Tolstoy believe was the only way to access truth and reason?

4. Who was the Tsar following the Decembrist rebellion?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Name some of the thinkers who influenced Herzen's thinking.

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

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

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

6. What was the effect of the "moral quarantine" of Western ideas in Russia?

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

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

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

10. What problems did Herzen have with Hegelian philosophy?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What cultural developments in Russia and what European philosophical and political ideas made the peasant commune an attractive basis for social organization to the populists?

Essay Topic 2

Was writing enough for Russian writers, or did they have to be known for their actions as well? Whether it is Herzen's radical magazine or Tolstoy's radical innovations on his estate, it seems that literature itself could never be more than a part of a man's identity. Why was this? Were there writers who were successful by simply being writers?

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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