View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Berlin describe Belinsky's legacy?

2. What balance did Herzen strike in his philosophy?

3. What European doctrine did Herzen deplore?

4. What qualities did the characters based on Belinsky possess?

5. Whose philosophy did Herzen follow?

Short Essay Questions

1. How did Tolstoy's theories and values appear in his novels?

2. What was the stance of the "new men" toward Turgenev?

3. According to Berlin, why was Turgenev attacked from both left and right?

4. What talent did Turgenev share with English poet John Keats?

5. What was the critical consensus on Tolstoy, and how does Berlin revise it?

6. What belief did Tolstoy share with Rousseau?

7. How was Turgenev's work viewed at the end of his life?

8. How did Hegel's ideas influence Herzen?

9. Describe Russian populism as a movement.

10. What was Herzen's early activist career like?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

What cultural institutions or customs were Russian writers trying to defend when they were resisting European ideas of progress and Enlightenment? How did authors define the unique "Russian soul?"

Essay Topic 3

How did Berlin's own life and times affect his writing about the writers and activists whose portraits he drew in Russian Thinkers? In what ways might Berlin have been trying to identify ideas that would be useful for him in his own time--after WWII and Viet Nam--in addition to identifying the ideas that motivated the Russian writers, populists, Romantics to try to change Russian culture?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 704 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample