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

2. What was the result of this group created by Gamma and his friends?
(a) The beginning of the communist government in Warsaw.
(b) Exiled for trying to usurp power from the center in Moscow.
(c) Disbanded after two years because it lost popularity.
(d) Publicly praised for its faithfulness to communist ideals.

3. Why did Delta begin to write violently anti-Semitic poems?
(a) He cared more about his audience than about the content.
(b) He had begun to think along those lines.
(c) The Communist Party commanded him to write them.
(d) He cared deeply about the political change going on around him.

4. Why are peasants not particularly dangerous, according to Milosz?
(a) The state is the only buyer of what they grow.
(b) They are happy with their lives.
(c) They are more easily involved in extensive underground work.
(d) They have no education and thus cannot retaliate.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. When he spent time in Moscow, what kinds of reports did Delta send back?

2. When a man refuses to become a shock-worker in a factory, what does he soon find?

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

4. Why is Christianity the state's primary enemy?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Milosz opens Chapter VI with a description of Vilna as it existed during his childhood. Is this simply to introduce Gamma or is there another reason?

4. How did Beta's circumstances lead him to a poetry that constantly moved? Why was it restless?

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

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

9. Beta's anger toward mankind became directed toward a fear of self-deception. How did this happen?

10. "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?

(see the answer keys)

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