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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. When do Beta's stories show that people are good?
(a) Only while acting within civilization.
(b) Inherently.
(c) When life has meaning.
(d) Only when it directly benefits them.

2. Why are workers told that it is a crime to strike?
(a) It is not in the best interests of the state.
(b) It has drastic negative effects on the entire nation.
(c) They are working for the state, which is to say for themselves.
(d) The highest goal of state factories is efficiency.

3. How were Gamma's interactions with people characterized?
(a) With complete honesty.
(b) By his loyalty to the party.
(c) With deceit and artifice.
(d) By his drive for power.

4. Why did Beta's writing assert that communism was salvation?
(a) Capitalism led to Hitlerism.
(b) Man would not think for himself.
(c) Capitalism could not provide for society's needs.
(d) Man was too weak to save himself.

5. Because he believed in earthly salvation, what did Beta argue?
(a) Anyone opposing mankind's happiness is evil.
(b) Only man can bring about his own happiness.
(c) History has no force in man's present struggles.
(d) Promises of heavenly salvation are false.

6. How can the relationship between Gamma and the author be described?
(a) A game.
(b) An acquaintanceship.
(c) A deep friendship.
(d) A love affair.

7. After coming to power, in 1945, the Party recognized that the best way to control a nation is through what force?
(a) Parades and speeches.
(b) The written and spoken word.
(c) Brute force.
(d) Spies and informers.

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

9. The state methods of teaching give the illusion of what?
(a) Complete knowledge.
(b) A mysterious unknown.
(c) Historical right.
(d) Complete power.

10. In Milosz's understanding, the class of the bourgeois is comprised of what people?
(a) Workers.
(b) Small merchants and craftsmen.
(c) Workers and peasants.
(d) National companies.

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

12. As Beta relates, when Greek prisoners cannot march because they are too weak, how are they first punished?
(a) With beatings.
(b) With sticks tied to their legs.
(c) With three days' hard labor.
(d) With death.

13. When Delta's writing no longer pleased the party, what happened?
(a) Publishers were instructed to print only the work that showed he had reformed.
(b) Publishers were instructed not to print his work.
(c) He was forced to print only in underground papers.
(d) He was exiled to Siberia for three years in a labor camp.

14. Beta remained bitter because he was unable to see what?
(a) Individual man apart from society.
(b) Society's reasons for action.
(c) Man in relation to his fellow man.
(d) The purpose of action within a community.

15. Why was Gamma's writing weak?
(a) Empathy.
(b) Proper doctrine.
(c) Previous success.
(d) Human emotion.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where did the man Gamma grow up?

2. Apart from his poetry, what was Delta's personality?

3. The last time Milosz saw Beta, how did the unassuming poet look?

4. Rather than condemning the four men about whom he writes, how does Milosz open Chapter 8?

5. In light of Beta's poetry, how does Milosz treat the modern artist's potential?

(see the answer keys)

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