AP Success - AP European History: Romanticism in 'White Nights'
"I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.
When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-"
Fyodor Dostoevsky, An Excerpt from White Nights, 1848
Question 1
The excerpt from Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'White Nights' is an example of which 19th-century intellectual movement?
Romanticism
Enlightenment
Existentialism
Realism
Question 2
Which of the following themes is most prominently reflected in the given excerpt from 'White Nights'?
The focus on social class and economic conditions
The importance of emotion and individual experience
The critique of traditional religious beliefs
The celebration of rational thought and empirical evidence
Question 3
The narrator's expression of intense personal feeling and imagination in the excerpt is most indicative of a reaction against which of the following?
The secularism of the French Revolution
The conservatism of the Restoration period
The rationalism of the Enlightenment
The industrialization of society
Question 4
The dream-like state and the focus on inner emotions in the excerpt can be seen as a precursor to which later 19th-century development in literature and philosophy?
Symbolism and early Modernism
Utilitarianism
Naturalism
Positivism
Question 5
Considering the historical context of 1848, the year when 'White Nights' was published, which of the following events is contemporaneous with the themes of personal liberation and emotional expression found in the text?
The publication of the Communist Manifesto
The beginning of the Crimean War
The European Revolutions of 1848
The Congress of Vienna
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