#QUIZ 1

1) Who wrote the 1859 novel Oblomov, whose lazy, daydreaming titular character satirizes the contemporary Russian nobility?
A. Andrey Bely
B. Ivan Goncharov ⬅️
C. Ivan Bunin
D. Vladimir Mayakovsky

2) What is the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina?
E. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
F. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.⬅️
G. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
H. 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?
1. Dead Souls⬅️
2. Nevsky Prospect
3. The Overcoat
4. The Government Inspector


4) Which of the following Vladimir Nabokov works was originally written in his native Russian?
1. Bend Sinister
2. Invitation to a Beheading⬅️
3. Pale Fire
4. Pnin


5) What is the name of the central character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment?
1. Rodion Raskolnikov⬅️
2. Fyodor Karamazov
3. Prince Myshkin
4. Porfiry Petrovich


6) Which of the following is not a play written by famed Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov?
1. The Cherry Orchard
2. Uncle Vanya
3. Three Sisters
4. The Lower Depths⬅️


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?
1. Anna Akhmatova⬅️
2. Boris Pasternak
3. Osip Mandelstam
4. Marina Tsvetayeva


8) Which 19th-century poet, novelist, and playwright is widely considered the father of modern Russian literature?
1. Aleksandr Ostrovsky
2. Ivan Goncharov
3. Aleksandr Pushkin⬅️
4. Mikhail Lermontov


9) Which historical pair are the subjects of the novel that “the Master” is writing in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita?
1. Pontius Pilate and Jesus⬅️
2. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky
3. Mark Antony and Cleopatra
4. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn


10) When was The Gulag Archipelago published?
A. 1973
B. 1958⬅️
C. 1968
D. 1974

11) Who refused the Nobel Prize for Literature for a work that was banned in the USSR?
A. Tatyana Yesenina
B. Andrei Zarin
C. Boris Pasternak⬅️
D. Vladimir Lenin

12) How many real brothers are there in The Brothers Karamazov?
A. 3⬅️
B. 5
C. 2
D. 9

13) Which poet and prose writer is known as Russia's national poet.
A. Pushkin⬅️
B. Lermontov
C. Minaev
D. Mandelshtam

14) Which writer spent time in a Siberian prison in the 19th century?
A. Babel
B. Dostoyevsky⬅️
C. Mandelshtam
D. Solzhenitsyn

15) Yuri Zivago was a
A. Poet
B. Chemist and Poet
C. Physicist and Poet⬅️
D. Mathematician

#RussianLiterature

~Answers Updated

Hope you're done with the Russians. Next on the menu are the French. The list is not exhaustive, will share more writers once we are done with these. #FrenchLiterature

Honoré de Balzac

#FrenchLiterature
1. La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) -magnum opus
○ The Comédie humaine consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works
○ multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848)
○ a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society"
○ originally called it Etudes des Mœurs ( literally 'Studies of manners', or 'The Ways of the World '
○ Selected Works:
§ Les Chouans (1829)
§ Sarrasine (1830) - (Roland Barthes' blow-by-blow analysis of the text in his book S/Z(1970). Barthes dissects the text in accordance with five "codes" (hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic and cultural).
§ La Peau de chagrin (1831) - (The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin)
§ Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831)
§ Le Colonel Chabert (1832)
§ Eugénie Grandet, (1833) his first best-seller.
§ Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835) - transposes the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris in order to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money.
2. Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature
3. "What a man he would have been had he known how to write! - Flaubert
4. W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" - and Dickens "the English Balzac"

NET for you.

Alexandre Dumas

• Dumas' last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, unfinished at his death, was completed by scholar Claude Schopp and published in 2005
• It was published in English in 2008 as The Last Cavalier.


Works:

• The Conspirators (Le chevalier d'Harmental, 1843)
• The Regent's Daughter (Une Fille du régent, 1845). Sequel to The Conspirators.
• The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1844–1846)


• The d'Artagnan Romances
1. The Three Musketeers, set between 1625 and 1628; first published in serial form in the magazine Le Siècle bebtween March and July 1844
2. Twenty Years After, set between 1648 and 1649; serialized from January to August, 1845.
3. The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, set between 1660 and 1673; serialized from October 1847 to January 1850

The Marie Antoinette romances
The Marie Antoinette romances comprise eight novels.

The Sainte-Hermine trilogy
• The Companions of Jehu (Les Compagnons de Jehu, 1857)
• The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et les Bleus, 1867)
The Knight of Sainte-Hermine (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, 1869)
#FrenchLiterature

Victor Marie Hugo (1802 - 1885)

Novels:
• Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
• Les Misérables (1862) [Read summary]
• William Shakespeare (1864)

Plays:
• Cromwell
• Hernani

He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

In France, Hugo is known primarily for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages).
#FrenchLiterature

Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)

• debut novel Madame Bovary (1857)
• took five years to write, was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856 (The government brought an action against the publisher and author on the charge of immorality, which was heard during the following year, but both were acquitted.)
• leading exponent of literary realism


short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.

Works:
1. Memoirs of a Madman (1838)
2. Madame Bovary (1857)
3. Salammbô (1862)
4. Sentimental Education (1869)
5. Le Candidat (1874)
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874)
#FrenchLiterature

Jules Vernes

French novelist, poet, and playwright.
• sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.
• A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous".[106] Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing." His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style"
• Most of the novels in the Voyages series (except for Five Weeks in a Balloon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and The Purchase of the North Pole) were first serialized in periodicals, usually in Hetzel’s Magasin d'Éducation et de récréation ("Magazine of Education and Recreation").

Works:
1.Five Weeks in a Balloon 1863
2. Journey to the Center of the Earth 1866
3. From the Earth to the Moon 1865
4. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1869
5. Around the Moon 1870
6. Discovery of the Earth
7. Around the World in Eighty Days 1873
8. The Mysterious Island 1874

Extraordinary Voyages is a sequence of fifty-four novels by the French writer Jules Verne, originally published between 1863 and 1905.
First Novel -
Five Weeks in a Balloon 1863
Last Novel -
Invasion of the Sea 1905
#FrenchLiterature

Jules Vernes (1828 - 1905)

Emile Zola

French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism.


"J'accuse…!" ("I accuse...!") was an open letter published on 13 January 1898 in the newspaper L'Aurore by the influential writer Émile Zola.
• In the letter, Zola addressed President of France Félix Faure and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General Staff officer who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude for espionage.


• Les Rougon-Macquart,
• Thérèse Raquin,
• Germinal - 1885 - Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s
• Nana
#FrenchLiterature

It's here. Apply

Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "

France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
#FrenchLiterature