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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 was Belinsky like in a debate?

2. When did Russian Populism begin to decline?

3. What does the Russian word "obshcnina" mean?

4. What view of Turgenev does Berlin say is misleading?

5. What allowed the leader of the Populists to lead?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What does the term "superfluous men" mean in Russian literature?

3. How did Hegel's ideas influence Herzen?

4. What did Russian populists experience when they went to the communes in 1874?

5. What was Tolstoy's education like?

6. Why was Chernychevsky wary of the state?

7. Why did Turgenev's character Bazarov inspire such strong responses from audiences?

8. What qualities did the characters based on Belinsky have?

9. What Western thinkers influenced Populism?

10. What was Tolstoy's social life like after graduating from university?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

Were literature and philosophy separable from politics in 19th-century Russian literature, or were they simply the meditative and artistic versions of political activity? What was it about the cultural moment of 19th-century Russia that turned philosophy and literature into political questions?

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)

This section contains 838 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample