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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do both Vladimir's writings on technical matters as well as philosophical have in common?
(a) They are filled with mistakes.
(b) They have the same steadiness of thought.
(c) They are both boring.
(d) They are inspiring.

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

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

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

5. What does Nabokov say they had lost that winter in St. Petersburg?
(a) Their "sylvan security."
(b) Their "secret hideaway."
(c) Their "lovers' nest."
(d) Their "true identities."

6. What is the response to Nabokov's published book of poems?
(a) Critics are not kind.
(b) Huge praise.
(c) No response.
(d) Critics want to see another book published.

7. What does Nabokov confess about Yuri and himself?
(a) The "slums of sex" were unknown to both of them.
(b) They know nothing about America.
(c) The devastation of war is new to them.
(d) They wish they had girlfriends.

8. What does young Nabokov's status as a child of the intelligentsia often do to him?
(a) It encourages him to make friends.
(b) He receives many compliments.
(c) It makes him stand out in a crowd.
(d) It isolates him from his fellow students

9. Who finds himself surrounded by social elites whose view of the Revolution is, at least at first, far more positive than his own?
(a) Dmitri.
(b) Sergey.
(c) Nabokov.
(d) Yuri.

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

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

12. Who does Nabokov meet at the age of sixteen?
(a) His youngest brother.
(b) A young girl named Colette.
(c) A young girl named Tamara.
(d) His cousin, Yuri.

13. What is a crippling experience for him?
(a) Writing poetry in Russian.
(b) Speaking English.
(c) Contracting polio.
(d) Falling off a horse.

14. After Cambridge, how is Nabokov's life?
(a) A middle-class life.
(b) A life of financial success and artistic destitution.
(c) A life of financial destitution and intellectual opulence.
(d) A similar life to that in Russia.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How would Nabokov spend hours?

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

3. In 1904, who does Nabokov remember meeting for the first time?

4. Why does Sergey end up in a concentration camp?

5. What is Nabokov's favorite Captain Mayne Reid novel?

(see the answer keys)

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