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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. Chapter 6 opens with a picture of Vilna, which is a city of __________ .

2. The state methods of teaching give the illusion of what?

3. As Beta relates, when Greek prisoners cannot march because they are too weak, how are they first punished?

4. As the NKVD began mass deportation, how did Gamma write communist propaganda?

5. Beta remained bitter because he was unable to see what?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How was Delta able to play the game that the center demanded of him--and be better at it?

3. Milosz states that the goals of the workers are far different from those of the state. How is this so?

4. Beta saw life only in terms of society rather than in terms of individual man. How was this his downfall?

5. 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?

6. How were Beta and the people of his generation fallen into dark hopelessness?

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

8. 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?

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

10. Eventually Delta's poems became something of a dream, unreal. How was this inevitable?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

It would seem that the exciting and invigorating power of this participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues" (66). How does this need, which springs up in aesthetic Ketman, drive a man's life? Party officials consider the need for strangeness a relic of the past, but how does this miss the truth of what's happening? What are the benefits of interacting within a bustling, changing environment?

Essay Topic 2

The reader sees, through many examples, that communism seeks to further its rule at all cost, even if that cost be millions of lives. Is this necessary for the continuance of communism, or is there another way? To what extent should a government assert itself on the lives of its citizens in order to survive?

Essay Topic 3

Throughout the book, the converts to communism decry the evils of capitalism, even going so far as to say capitalism led directly to Hitlerism (pg. 128, Beta's assertion). Is this necessarily true? If communism leads, as history has proven, to a dictatorship, then where does capitalism lead?

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