artcetera

THE WEEKLY QUIZ THAT TESTS YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE ARTS

1 What country had Strelsau for its capital and the Elphbergs as rulers?

2 What country was visited by Raphael Hythlodaeus?

3 In what country, notable for its Musical Banks, would you meet Yram, the Nosnibor family and the professors Hanky and Panky?

4 What country (capital Jacksonburg) was visited by the nature writer William Boot (and not, as intended, by the rising young author John Courtney Boot)?

5 What country was run by President Rufus T Firefly? And with what neighbouring country was it at war?

6. What country was the homeland of Charles Kinbote (friend and literary executor of the American poet Charles Shade)?

ANSWERS:

1 Ruritania, in Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).

2 Utopia, in the book by Sir Thomas More (1516). (The narrator's name is often anglicised as Ralph Hythloday.) 3 Erewhon, in Samuel Butler's book of 1872 and its sequel, Erewhon Revisited (1901). 4 Ishmaelia, in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop (1938). 5 Fredonia and Sylvania in the Marx Brothers' classic Duck Soup (1933). 6 Zembla, a distant northern land, in Vladimir Nabokov's poem/novel Pale Fire (1962).