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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In the context of Chapter 8, peasants are divided into three categories so that what happens?
(a) Mutual hatred grows among them.
(b) They form ties outside their social class.
(c) The Center can better govern them.
(d) Work is done most efficiently.

2. Catholic Communists gradually lose everything except what aspect?
(a) Their trust in the Virgin Mary.
(b) The language of religion.
(c) A basic belief in God.
(d) Their sense of guilt.

3. As Milosz witnessed, why was becoming a communist a difficult decision?
(a) A person gave up all his personal property.
(b) A person renounced his sense of personality.
(c) A person became subject to the whims of the bourgeois.
(d) A person renounced his sense of nationalism.

4. In communist thought, where is there no division?
(a) Between worker and peasant.
(b) Between man and society.
(c) Between what man does and what he thinks.
(d) Between man and woman.

5. How was Delta's cheerful poetry treated?
(a) Ignored by the party.
(b) Mocked by the public.
(c) Put to good use by the party.
(d) Scorned by the party as sentimental.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was the title of Beta's first book?

2. How much time did Beta spend in the concentration camp Auschwitz?

3. In Chapter 8, how does the party treat whatever is not expressed?

4. When someone asked about his family and origins, how would Delta answer?

5. After being captured as a Polish soldier, what happened to Delta?

Short Essay Questions

1. How was Delta's poetry some of the most insightful work being written at the time?

2. How were Beta's stories a fitting insight into his nihilist worldview?

3. How could Delta, who was not racist, write such violently anti-Semitic material?

4. Rather than blaming these four men for the choices they made, Milosz says they were slaves to history. How is this true?

5. Why is Gamma called "the slave of history"? Whose interests does he serve?

6. Gamma did not even try to save his family when they were deported to Siberia. How is this a vivid example of the communist attitude toward individual lives?

7. Milosz writes that Delta could not (or would not) distinguish between truth and fable, even in his personal life. Is this the kind of mind the Party would have wanted?

8. In Chapter VIII, Milosz takes on the tone of a communist to describe the evils of the various classes. How is this more powerful than a mere description?

9. "Still, it was not easy to become a communist, for communism meant a complete revision of one's concepts of nationality " (pg. 147). How was this true?

10. Milosz calls Beta's reaction to the concentration camp life sadistic. How is this true?

(see the answer keys)

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