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

2. When a man refuses to become a shock-worker in a factory, what does he soon find?
(a) He is demoted until he can learn respect.
(b) He is denied the privileges of better work or vacation.
(c) He is imprisoned until his views change.
(d) He is fired, and cannot provide for his family.

3. Often when Milosz sees women walking through the streets of Paris, what does he remember?
(a) A Polish girl brushing her hair.
(b) A Jewish girl shot while running for her life.
(c) His dead wife.
(d) An unknown girl run over by an SS truck.

4. What kind of mentality do peasants have, according to the state?
(a) Feudalist.
(b) Unrealistic.
(c) Low-class.
(d) Middle-class.

5. When man is faced with constant death and when life seems meaningless, how does dialectical materialism seem?
(a) Mathematical and calculating.
(b) Useless and outmoded.
(c) Mysterious and full of meaning.
(d) Like a refuge.

Short Answer Questions

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

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

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

4. What view of Poland's past did Delta's poetry present?

5. While living in exile, how did Delta feel?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the party's definition of a reactionary reduce him to a comic level?

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

3. Why does Milosz go to such pains to describe Gamma, when the other writers found in his book are given only a few sentences of description?

4. Nearly six years of Nazi rule had radically changed people's ideas of private property. Did this help or harm the communist idea of common property?

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

6. 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?

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

8. How are the peasants, in several ways, the most helpless class of people?

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

(see the answer keys)

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