Another Russian Literature Quiz

Question: Who is the protagonist in Crime and Punishment?

Answer: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) has as its protagonist a young intellectual, Raskolnikov, willing to gamble on ideas.

Question: Who wrote Dead Souls and “The Overcoat,” which are considered the foundation of 19th-century Russian Realism?

Answer: Nikolay Gogol is the Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist whose novel Myortvye dushi (Dead Souls) and whose short story “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) are considered the foundation of the 19th-century tradition of Russian Realism.

Question: From which novel of Leo Tolstoy is the statement “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” taken?

Answer: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (published in installments from 1875 to 1877) opens with the line “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Question: Who is considered the founder of modern Russian literature?

Answer: The poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer Aleksandr Pushkin has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

Question: Which Russian writer was forced by his country to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958?

Answer: Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour.