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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Vladimir do before hurrying young Nabokov along to school?
(a) He checks his school work.
(b) He makes sure he eats breakfast.
(c) He has him take a bath.
(d) He bends down to kiss Nabokov.

2. What puts Nabokov at odds with many of his colleagues?
(a) His opinions of the state of affairs in his home country.
(b) His Russian accent.
(c) His desire to emigrate to the United States.
(d) His inability to speak English.

3. Vladimir is raised by his own share of governesses and tutors but where does he go at the age of 13?
(a) Poly Preparatory.
(b) St. Petersburg Academy.
(c) Berkshire Boys Academy.
(d) The Gymnasium.

4. Who is he surprised to see on stage as "The Gala Girls?"
(a) His mother and his sisters.
(b) Colette and her friends.
(c) The American girls from the skating rink.
(d) Girls from the local village.

5. What happens, when winter comes, to their love affair?
(a) It comes out in the open.
(b) It has to endure a life of closer scrutiny.
(c) It ends.
(d) It fades to nothing.

6. When does Nabokov begin to write poetry?
(a) Around 1914.
(b) Around 1904.
(c) Around 1934.
(d) Around 1924.

7. Why do they hire the village schoolmaster, though he is not technically one of the family's regular tutors?
(a) To give them a crash course in the Russian language.
(b) To give them mathematics lessons.
(c) To give them writing lessons.
(d) To give them French lessons.

8. Why does Sergey end up in a concentration camp?
(a) He is Jewish.
(b) He is captured by the Nazis as a POW.
(c) Due to his outspoken opposition to the regime.
(d) He humiliated a high-ranking official.

9. What does he describe with obvious revelry?
(a) The feeling of selfless isolation that such prolonged expenditures of concentration engenders.
(b) The feeling of power and excertion in playing a game of lawn tennis with family and friends.
(c) The feeling of freedom in hunting and capturing a new species of butterfly.
(d) The feeling of isolation and contentment when writing a work of poetry.

10. Though he is an excellent teacher to the Nabokov boys, what does Lenski find difficult?
(a) His own studies.
(b) Teaching the boys mathematics.
(c) Making his lessons interesting.
(d) Teaching the boys to be well-behaved.

11. How is Nabokov's life at Cambridge, compared to his former existence?
(a) Wonderful.
(b) Different, but good.
(c) Dismal.
(d) Very similar.

12. The boredom of the audience at these poetry performances is obvious to everyone but whom?
(a) Max.
(b) Lenski.
(c) Dmitri.
(d) Nabokov.

13. What is Lenski's idea for the use of Magic-Lantern Projections?
(a) To illustrate petic works with the use of slides.
(b) To create shadow puppets.
(c) To play in the light from the lanterns.
(d) To create special effects on the wall.

14. What does the headstrong Yuri in later life introduce to Nabokov?
(a) Poetry.
(b) Butterflies.
(c) The Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid.
(d) The French language.

15. To where do the boys win scholarships?
(a) College of William and Mary.
(b) Oxford.
(c) University of Paris.
(d) Tufts University.

Short Answer Questions

1. What do Yuri and Nabokov invent?

2. How does she respond to his poem?

3. His other brother, Sergey, is only a year younger than Nabokov. The two are raised together, but what makes them different?

4. How does Sergei save the brothers from the Bolsheviks on the train?

5. Why does Nabokov ride his bike each afternoon past the house of the family's head coachmen?

(see the answer keys)

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