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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. At what does Nabokov hint about Sergey?
(a) His possible homosexuality.
(b) His desire to join the military.
(c) His interest in a girl.
(d) His wish to emigrate to America.

2. When does his first poem take shape in his mind?
(a) While searching for butterflies.
(b) During a theatrical performance.
(c) While sitting with his mother.
(d) During a sudden thunderstorm.

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

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

5. Who is their first spelling tutor?
(a) Ordo.
(b) Max.
(c) Oliver.
(d) Dmitri.

6. What is Nabokov called in exile?
(a) A dirty Russian.
(b) A ymigry.
(c) A white Russian.
(d) An immigrant.

7. While he is writing a poem, to what is he prone?
(a) To sing to himself.
(b) To bounce ideas off his mother.
(c) To wander aimlessly through the forest.
(d) Long lapses of attention to the world around him.

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

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

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

11. How does Sergei save the brothers from the Bolsheviks on the train?
(a) He convinces the Bolsheviks that he has leprosy.
(b) He convinces them he has typhus and that is why they are traveling alone in a locked compartment.
(c) He shoots at the Bolsheviks.
(d) He holds them out a window.

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

13. What is the last Nabokov hears of Lenski?
(a) He is a professor at the University of Paris.
(b) He is scrapping by, selling painted seashells on the Riviera in France.
(c) He is working as an actor in London.
(d) He owns a restaurant in Dublin.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Sergey do during WWII?

2. In 1914, a sixteen-year-old Yuri visits the Nabokovs,and what does he produce?

3. How would Nabokov spend hours?

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

5. What casts a cloud over the exiled Russian intelligentsia?

(see the answer keys)

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