(MC) Russian Madness Questions

1) In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter says, [Victorian] doctors regarded puberty as one of the most psychologically dangerous periods of the female life-cycle, and asserts herself that, puberty was a turbulent period for Victorian girls, a potentially traumatic transition €¦ According to Showalter’s analysis, which of the following is NOT a reason why that transition might have been traumatic?

Answer

a)The prudery of many girls’ mothers prevented them from preparing their daughters for menstruation at all, leaving some girls terrified of what they could only construe as vaginal hemorrhaging.

b) Though prior to puberty girls lived very similar lives to boys, after menstruation girls remained in the home, having limited contact with the outside world while boys went on to be schooled and pursue employment.

c) After the onset of menstruation, simply managing the hygiene of their monthly cycles in households wherein menstruation could not be acknowledged led to shame and anxiety as well as the curtailment of all physical activities.

d) Puberty was thought to be one of the times in a girl’s life when she was most susceptible to spoiling at the hands of neighbors jealous of her emerging beauty and fecundity.
2) Showalter explains that physicians saw hysterical women as their powerful antagonists. Why was this?
Answer

a) Physicians, who were attempting to redefine sex roles to liberate women from their circumscribed domestic lives, felt stymied by hysterical women who had no interest in liberation and experienced no displeasure in their traditional gender roles.

b) Though hysteria was a malady accepted as real among the general community these women were a part of, many physicians believed that hysteria was not a real medical condition, and that their patients were malingerers.

c) Showalter wrote no such thing; in fact, physicians were frequently impressed with hysterical women, calling them, just the kind of women one likes to meet with, sensible €¦ exhibiting a proper amount of illness €¦

d) When hysterical women became sick, they were relieved of their self-sacrificing duties and occupied a position in which they were nursed and indulged; physicians didn’t like being accomplices in their escape from domestic roles.

3) Within Russian peasant communities, klikushestvo was generally understood to be caused by €¦
Answer

a) ergotism, brought on by fungus-tainted rye grain.

b) demon possession.

c) women’s reproductive systems.

d) the social pressures accompanying women’s traditional gender roles.

4) In Giselle’s Mania what does the director seem to suggest is the cause of Olga’s madness?
Answer

a) Puberty
b) Spoiling
c) Her relationship with her father

d) Her romantic relationships

5) James Billington, in The Soviet Era, names three concepts from the Russian intellectual tradition that Lenin relied on. Which is NOT one of them?
Answer

a) The predilection for theories of history that promise universal redemption but attach special importance to Russian leadership.

b) The conviction that any alternative to the tstarist authority must be cemented by an all-embracing ideology.

c) The expropriation of the populist myth of the people as a new source of moral sanction.

d) The Orthodox view of the world as being composed of dialectical opposites.

6) Billington points to several ways in which Lenin was different from his intellectual predecessors. Which of the following is NOT one of the distinctions he mentions?
Answer

a) Lenin’s break with the belief in the existence of objective moral laws for human behavior; with Lenin, morality was relentlessly relative, dictated by party expediency.

b) Lenin’s teaching had a novel focus: his emphasis on organization. The tradition of secret, disciplined, hierarchical organization had never before struck deep roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition.

c) Lenin sought to systematically impose on Russia a new monolithic culture that represented the antithesis of the varied, cosmopolitan, and experimental culture that had preceded him.

d) Lenin was uniquely single-minded in an age of diffusion. In the midst of the soaring visionaries, Lenin focused on one all-consuming objective: the attainment of power.

7) According to MacKenzie and Curran in Russia, The Soviet Union and Beyond, after Stalin’s death €¦
Answer

a) the Soviet system was so weakened that it soon after collapsed.

b) Krushchev called for a re-evaluation of Communist principles, resulting in a move towards a more democratic socialism in the Soviet Union.

c) the principle of collective leadership was revived and individual dictatorship was repudiated as Krushchev began a campaign of de-Stalinization.

d) he was replaced by his underling Krushchev, who maintained and even strengthened Stalin’s dictatorial policies.

8) Beginning in 1964 after the abrupt end of Krushchev’s rule, Soviet leaders €¦
Answer

a) abandoned the campaign of de-Stalinization and returned partially to Stalinism, tightening controls over intellectuals and dissidents.

b) ed up dialogues with America and Japan, seeking guidance from both countries in reforming their political and economic systems.

c) continued Krushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization and pursued more and more daring political and economic reforms.

d) instituted the policies of perestroika and glasnost to foster economic reform and ness in government and the press.

9) Segal maintains that the tendency toward involuntary hospitalization in the USSR was actually the opposite of that which obtained under Stalin. Why does Segal suggest that involuntary hospitalization only emerged after Stalin?
Answer

a) Stalin simply didn’t have the means by which to control psychiatric diagnoses.

b) Stalin’s heirs had a weakened and even liberalized regime that wanted to avoid the incredible violence of Stalin’s repressions, and so had to utilize a more discrete method for dealing with political dissent.

c) This is untrue; Stalin developed the practice of involuntary hospitalization himself as a way to more subtly torment his opposition in the intelligentsia.

d) Stalin’s heirs devised involuntary hospitalization as a way to deal with very powerful dissenters; otherwise, they continued to murderously purge weak and powerless threats to the Soviet state.

10) In the poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov, Gorchakov is asked by the doctors overseeing the institution to provide incriminating information on Gorbunov. Gorchakov €¦
Answer

a) provides them with little real information, but the doctors interpret his musings on Gorbunov in ways that would seem to convict Gorbunov of holding anti-Soviet ideas.

b) refuses.

c) provides them with concrete proof of Gorbunov’s anti-Soviet organizing.

d) tries to provide them with incriminating information, but the doctors think he is lying, and decide to release Gorbunov.

11) Joseph Brodsky €¦
Answer

a) went into madhouses as research, but never as a patient.

b) spent time in psychiatric facilities in hope of avoiding harsher punishment.

c) was perfectly mentally sound, but was imprisoned for years in a psychiatric facility because of his dissent against the Soviet system.

d) had never been in a mental hospital, but wrote Gorbunov and Gorchakov based on friends’ accounts.

12) According to Lev Loseff in his article On Hostile Ground, Gorbunov and Gorchakov represent €¦
Answer

a) schizophrenic voices.

b) a division between the feeling self and the reasoning self.

c) the subjective self and the male gaze.

d) the free, democratic world and the restrictive Soviet world.

13) Glasnost, the policy of greater ness in public media, was instituted by €¦
Answer

a) Lenin

b) Yeltsin

c) Gorbachev

d) Krushchev
14) According to McKenzie and Curran, after the end of the Soviet system in the 1990s€¦
Answer

a) the public heath system crumbled, as life expectancy declined, population collapsed, virulent diseases spread, and pollution and contamination ravaged Russian health.

b) opportunities that had previously only existed for residents of St. Petersburg and Moscow spread to other areas of Russia, where life changed dramatically.

c) though the marketplace brought about a different way of disseminating literature, poets and authors maintained their place as the moral conscience of Russian society.

d) it became clear that religion had well and truly been destroyed by the atheism of the Soviet Union, as the Orthodox faith did not re-emerge in Russia.

15) According to Julie Brown in the Afterward to Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, mental health in post-Soviet Russia €¦
Answer

a) was almost entirely ignored in commentary about the changing Russia, reflecting a lack of concern on the part of Russians with the field of psychiatry.

b) has been roundly agreed upon by all commentators to be declining rapidly in the face of social upheaval and stressful economic reorganization.

c) has received a lot of commentary, though it is difficult to judge the nature and extent of mental health problems in the new Russia; some say rates of illness have risen sharply, others say that the incidence of mental disorders has not changed.

d) improved tremendously as people were freed from the tyranny of Communism and Soviet oppression.

16) In general, which of the following is NOT true about Russian attitudes towards mental health care?
Answer

a) In general, there has been a rush to embraced a reformed professional Russian psychiatry as a way to seek aid in a time of social upheaval.
b) Some claim there is a threat posed by a Russian anti-psychiatry movement and the elevation of Western concepts of law over more traditional notions of mercy as they apply to mentally disabled.

c) Psychiatrists are still seen by many as bearing the stigma of participation in repressive state policies of involuntary hospitalization.

d) In the new mental health marketplace, professional psychiatrists must compete with a broad array of alternative therapies.

17) In Volodin’s vision, his partner Kolyan compares the Christian understanding of life after death and a person’s relationship with God to €¦
Answer

a) life during the Russian revolution.

b) the traditional Japanese understanding.

c) life under Stalin.

d) the Buddhist understanding.

18) In Serdyuk’s vision, he expresses an admiration for the Japanese people and the belief that Russia should follow (his idea of) their example because which of the following concepts allows them to live like normal human beings?
Answer

a) Capitalism.

b) Duty.

c) Nihilism.

d) Sentimentality.

19) At the end of the novel, Chapayev presents Pyotr with a token from Anna. What is it?
Answer

a) A sword.

b) A yellow rose.

c) A bagel.

d) An astrakhan hat.

20) Angela Brintlinger, in Hero in the Madhouse, says of Buddha’s Little Finger that some Russian critics have found it unethical. Why?
Answer

a) The novel promotes drug use.

b) The novel glorifies new Russian gangsters.

c) The novel encourages irresponsible disengagement from society.

d) The novel denigrates traditional Christian Orthodoxy.