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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What appeared on a tree stump at the end of "Sententious"?

2. What did the narrator claim was "a relative concept"? ("In the Bathhouse")

3. What did Garkunov have under his dirty undershirt?

4. What did the narrator compare the hills to in "A Pushover Job"?

5. Who did Fedya write to at the end of "Dry Rations"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What notations did the guards, described in "Prosthetic Appliances", use to show that a convict would not receive hot food and/or bread?

2. Why did the convicts that had been in the camps take their bread back to their barracks? ("Major Pugachov's Last Battle")

3. What did Savelev do after finding Ivanovich hung himself?

4. What prosthetics were collected by the guards in "Prosthetic Appliances"?

5. In "Sententious," who did the narrator say that he envied?

6. What did the narrator say about death in "Sententious"?

7. How did the story "Sententious" end?

8. What did the narrator in "A Pushover Job" and his companion do to full-fill their quota of pine needles?

9. What plans did Bagretsov have for the underwear that he took off of the corpse?

10. Why was the Siberian dwarf cedar called a "weatherman" by the narrator?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Many of the guards in the stories are described by their attitudes towards the camp convicts. Describe the different ways that guards were described, how these descriptions mandated how convicts felt about the guards, and how the convicts acted around different guards based upon their dispositions.

Essay Topic 2

The harshness of work in the camps was described through the severe actions that convicts would go to to avoid it. Describe three examples where convicts sacrificed themselves, in one way or another, to avoid work in the camps.

Essay Topic 3

Based upon the text, what three things do you think that the forced-laborers in Kolyma needed to survive? Find three different needs and explain why they were necessary for survival in Kolyma.

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