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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 did Belinsky find in literature?

2. What novel did Turgenev publish five years after Fathers and Children?

3. What did Herzen believe was the "goal" of life?

4. Where did Belinsky receive encouragement?

5. Which character was based on Belinsky?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Tolstoy's education like?

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

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

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

5. Why was Chernychevsky wary of the state?

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

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

8. Describe Russian populism as a movement.

9. What Western thinkers influenced Populism?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

Why was Russian culture so ripe for revolution and transformation? What traits of inherited Russian culture made it so receptive to external ideas such as Hegel's ideas about history or Rousseau's ideas about the innocence of children?

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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