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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 bends down to kiss Nabokov.
(b) He has him take a bath.
(c) He makes sure he eats breakfast.
(d) He checks his school work.

2. What does Vladimir continue to do while in exile in Berlin?
(a) Own property in Russia.
(b) Work for the Russian government.
(c) Write about human rights.
(d) Take his family to France for the summers.

3. How does Lett punish the boys?
(a) By forcing them to spar with him in the boxing ring.
(b) By telling their parents.
(c) By giving them chores to do.
(d) By having them sit facing a corner.

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

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

6. What earns Vladimir several rebukes from the Tsarist government?
(a) His tardiness to meetings.
(b) His increasing outspokenness about human rights.
(c) His refusal to be on this council.
(d) His teasing of the Tsarina.

7. What fills Nabokov with surprise, while roller-skating?
(a) His mother skates very well.
(b) He is not very good.
(c) An older American girl comments on his excellent skating.
(d) Colette is also roller-skating.

8. What do Yuri and Nabokov invent?
(a) A game.
(b) A way to distract siblings.
(c) A weapon.
(d) A tool to make household chores easier.

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

10. What tutor looks like the French actor Max Linder?
(a) A Greek spelling teacher.
(b) A Russian literature tutor.
(c) A polish medical student.
(d) A graduate student.

11. How does Nabokov's father die?
(a) He commits suicide in Paris.
(b) He is assassinated in Berlin.
(c) He has a stroke in Berlin.
(d) He has a heart attack in Paris.

12. What does Vladimir study at St. Petersburg University?
(a) Art.
(b) Music.
(c) Law.
(d) Medicine.

13. Other than his wife, what does Nabokov claim about his good friends?
(a) They are artists and writers, like himself.
(b) He has many.
(c) They are all writers.
(d) To have made no more than two good friends over a span of twenty years.

14. What casts a cloud over the exiled Russian intelligentsia?
(a) The inability to publish in their home country.
(b) Their inability to move to another European coutnry.
(c) Their inability to speak English.
(d) Their inabiltiy to move to the United States.

15. What does Nabokov remember about his father's remarkable writing ability?
(a) He is very poetic.
(b) He could spell any word.
(c) He could write sentence after sentence without correction.
(d) He has beautiful handwriting.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Sergey do during WWII?

2. In 1910, what do the Nabokov brothers acquire?

3. What types of tutors does Nabokov's father seem to intentionally choose?

4. After Cambridge, how is Nabokov's life?

5. What do both Vladimir's writings on technical matters as well as philosophical have in common?

(see the answer keys)

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