Q 01/05

Nihilism takes its name from the Latin word nihil, also the root of annihilate, meaning what?

A) Nothing

B) Darkness

C) Freedom

D) Disorder

Answer · why

A) Nothing

Nothing is the literal sense of nihil, so the word amounts to an ideology of negation. It emerged in 18th-century Germany, first as a literary term an...

Q 02/05

Which Ivan Turgenev novel about a young medical student made the word nihilism popular in Russia?

A) Home of the Gentry

B) Virgin Soil

C) Torrents of Spring

D) Fathers and Sons

Answer · why

D) Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons sets a brash young nihilist against the genteel older generation of his friend's family. Some Russian revolutionaries later took its ...

Q 03/05

Albert Camus made which boulder-pushing figure of Greek myth his emblem of life's pointless toil?

A) Tantalus

B) Sisyphus

C) Prometheus

D) Atlas

Answer · why

B) Sisyphus

Sisyphus must shove his rock up a mountain forever, only to watch it roll back down each time. Camus's 1942 essay argues that such a fate calls for re...

Q 04/05

Which Coen brothers comedy has a bowling slacker called the Dude menaced by German nihilists?

A) Fargo

B) Raising Arizona

C) The Big Lebowski

D) Burn After Reading

Answer · why

C) The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski has its nihilists demand ransom for a woman who had simply gone out of town. They post a severed toe as proof and later set fire to t...

Q 05/05

Which art movement from wartime Zurich voiced nihilism through nonsense and a urinal shown as art?

A) Cubism

B) Futurism

C) Surrealism

D) Dada

Answer · why

D) Dada

Dada emerged during the First World War as a rejection of established moral, social and artistic standards. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a readymade uri...