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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does she respond to his poem?
(a) She sits patiently and then asks a lot of questions.
(b) She does not think it is very good.
(c) She is hardly paying attention to the poem.
(d) She sits listening with tears in her eyes.

2. Why does she hand him a hand mirror?
(a) He has grown so much.
(b) He had smashed a mosquito on his cheek.
(c) His face is covered in dirt.
(d) He has a cut on his forehead.

3. What precaution does Nabokov's father take?
(a) He sends his family to Crimea.
(b) He sends them to the United States.
(c) He puts them in hiding in St. Petersburg.
(d) He changes their last name

4. Why is Lenski working as a tutor?
(a) He is paying off a debt to Nabokov's father.
(b) He loves teaching children.
(c) To put his son through undergraduate school at Cambridge.
(d) To put himself through graduate school at the University in St. Petersburg.

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

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

7. Why does Nabokov feel exiled in Crimea, a Russian territory?
(a) He does not have his family with him.
(b) The environment is so foreign.
(c) He misses his butterflies.
(d) He misses Tamara.

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

9. What happens to Yuri in northern Crimea?
(a) He is married.
(b) He is killed.
(c) He is captured.
(d) He converts to Catholicism.

10. Why does Max endear himself to the dogs?
(a) He loves dogs.
(b) He is initially afraid of them, so he gives them treats, so they will stay calm.
(c) He would like to own a kennel of his own some day.
(d) So they do not raise the alarm when he comes back from his late night trysts.

11. Once, upon returning from the park with a poem freshly in his mind, what does he do?
(a) He recites it to his sister.
(b) He decides to recite the work to his mother.
(c) He recites it to his grandmother.
(d) He recites it to his nanny.

12. How many children do the Nabokovs eventually have?
(a) Two.
(b) Four.
(c) Six.
(d) Five.

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

14. What does she tell him when he is finished reciting the poem?
(a) He should find another hobby.
(b) He should have it published.
(c) She proclaims it wonderful and beyond compare.
(d) Studying butterflies is a better way to spend one's day.

15. Nabokov develops a fondness for what?
(a) Lawn tennis.
(b) Composing chess problems.
(c) Butterflies.
(d) Poetry.

Short Answer Questions

1. Why do they hire the village schoolmaster, though he is not technically one of the family's regular tutors?

2. What tutor looks like the French actor Max Linder?

3. The boredom of the audience at these poetry performances is obvious to everyone but whom?

4. What is Vladimir elected to, which the Tsar dissolves?

5. What does the revolution do to most of the Russian writers and artists?

(see the answer keys)

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