This character recalls Cleopatra’s habit of sticking gold pins in her servants’ breasts to assert that “man is extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.” For 10 points each:
[10m] Identify this character, who mocks a scientifically perfect “palace of crystal” in favor of man’s free will. This character vengefully plans to bump into a police officer in the section “Apropos of the Wet Snow.”
ANSWER: the Underground Man [or the protagonist or narrator of Notes from the Underground)
[10h] Fyodor Dostoevsky borrowed the metaphor of the Crystal Palace as a utopian ideal from this novel, in which it is one of several dreams that come to commune leader Vera Pavlovna.
ANSWER: What Is to Be Done? [or Schto delat] (by Nikolai Chernyshevsky)
[10e] The Underground Man rejects What Is To Be Done?’s utopianism by praising an incorrect form of this statement as “charming.” In 1984, O’Brien forces Winston to accept that this mathematical expression equals five, rather than four.
ANSWER: two plus two [or other equivalent expressions, such as two and two make five]
<HG, European Literature>