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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. Where was Belinsky born?

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

3. When did Tolstoy's reputation change?

4. What idea caused Tolstoy agony?

5. How did Tolstoy get along with the literary salons?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How did Hegel's ideas influence Herzen?

3. Where did characters based on Belinsky appear in Russian literature?

4. What was Tolstoy's education like?

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

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

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

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

9. Why was Chernychevsky wary of the state?

10. What balances did Belinsky strike in his social status and identity?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 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

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)

This section contains 759 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample