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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 group was Herzen part of in university?

2. How did Herzen manifest the values he shared with his circle?

3. How does Berlin ultimately characterize Turgenev?

4. What were the Russian Populists opposed to?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How did Belinsky see literature's use?

3. What was Turgenev's political stance, and how had he formulated it?

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

5. What signs indicate the importance of Belinsky in Russian culture?

6. What was Tolstoy's education like?

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

8. What course of action did Tolstoy advocate for intellectuals?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

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 3

What cultural factors made the Russian populists so popular at first and then so ineffective? Why were populist leaders so out of touch that when populists went to the communes in 1874, the peasants rebuffed them whose organization they idealized?

(see the answer keys)

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