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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. Who converted Belinsky to the idealism of Fichte and Schelling?

2. What theme does Turgenev's novel Fathers and Children deal with?

3. What values did Herzen share with the group he was part of?

4. What was Belinsky's father like?

5. What did Belinsky find in literature?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Describe Russian populism as a movement.

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

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

6. Why did Turgenev and Botkin despise Chernychevsky?

7. What belief did Tolstoy share with Rousseau?

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

Berlin uses the adage of the fox and the hedgehog to describe Tolstoy as a materialist who saw the value of being an idealist, but in Tolstoy's works, the authorial eye could only see the grand designs, never by the characters. Which characters tried to see the design behind events? Which authors did not? Which authors were successful?

Essay Topic 3

Where else in the modern world are people playing out this tension between progress on one hand and nationalism or localism, on the other? How does the Russian example--of revolutionaries trying to preserve Russian social structures in the face of industrial or modern reforms--relate to the modern example?

(see the answer keys)

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