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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 novel did Turgenev publish five years after Fathers and Children?

2. What sentiment ultimately moved the Populists?

3. What European doctrine did Herzen deplore?

4. Where did Tolstoy find the source of his philosophy?

5. Where was Herzen born?

Short Essay Questions

1. How are Herzen and Turgenev similar? How are they different?

2. Why did Turgenev and Botkin despise Chernychevsky?

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

4. Who was Nikolay Chernychevsky and what was his role in Russian culture?

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

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

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

8. What was Herzen's relationship with his friends?

9. Why was Chernychevsky wary of the state?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How were the roles of literature and literary criticism different in 19th-century Russia? What did critics expect to do in criticism? What did writers expect to do by writing? In which writers, or in what cases did these functions overlap? Where did they diverge, or tear a writer's work in two directions?

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

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?

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