Quiz  /  Russian Literature Quiz

  • 1. 
    Who wrote the 1859 novel Oblomov, whose lazy, daydreaming titular character satirizes the contemporary Russian nobility?

  • Andrey Bely
  • Ivan Goncharov
  • Vladimir Mayakovsky
  • Ivan Bunin

  • 2. 
    What is the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina?

  • It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
  • All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
  • It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
  • Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

  • 3. 
    What novel written by Nikolai Gogol traces the adventures of the landless social-climbing Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant out to seek his fortune?

  • The Government Inspector
  • Dead Souls
  • The Overcoat
  • Nevsky Prospect

  • 4. 
    Which of the following Vladimir Nabokov works was originally written in his native Russian?

  • Pnin
  • Invitation to a Beheading
  • Pale Fire
  • Bend Sinister

  • 5. 
    What is the name of the central character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment?

  • Rodion Raskolnikov
  • Prince Myshkin
  • Porfiry Petrovich
  • Fyodor Karamazov

  • 6. 
    Which of the following is not a play written by famed Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov?

  • The Lower Depths
  • Three Sisters
  • The Cherry Orchard
  • Uncle Vanya

  • 7. 
    One of the few outspoken writers to survive Stalin’s regime, which poet was nevertheless prevented by the Soviet government from publishing any work from 1923 to 1940?

  • Boris Pasternak
  • Osip Mandelstam
  • Marina Tsvetayeva
  • Anna Akhmatova

  • 8. 
    Which philosophy does Bazarov, the central character of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, subscribe to?

  • Existentialism
  • Nihilism
  • Pragmatism
  • Transcendentalism

  • 9. 
    Which 19th-century poet, novelist, and playwright is widely considered the father of modern Russian literature?

  • Mikhail Lermontov
  • Aleksandr Pushkin
  • Ivan Goncharov
  • Aleksandr Ostrovsky

  • 10. 
    Which historical pair are the subjects of the novel that “the Master” is writing in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita?

  • Pontius Pilate and Jesus
  • Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn
  • Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky
  • Mark Antony and Cleopatra
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