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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 concentration camp, what is Beta's job?
(a) Directing Jews to the gas chambers or work.
(b) Unloading Jews from the box-cars.
(c) Rationing food to the prisoners.
(d) Removing bodies from the gas chambers.

2. After being captured as a Polish soldier, what happened to Delta?
(a) Was released because he was too weak to work.
(b) Was conscripted as a Russian soldier.
(c) Spent five years as a Russian prisoner.
(d) Spent five years in a German labor camp.

3. How did Delta return to his wife in Poland?
(a) With a girlfriend he'd brought from Brussels.
(b) Completely sober.
(c) With a girl he'd picked up at the Polish border.
(d) Without a single penny.

4. Rather than condemning the four men about whom he writes, how does Milosz open Chapter 8?
(a) Saying they were victims of historical circumstance
(b) Saying they were enslaved by their ways of thinking.
(c) Saying they were misguided by their education.
(d) Saying the situation was too senseless to see the truth.

5. In Russia, what organization did Gamma and several of his friends create?
(a) The Union of Workers.
(b) The Union of Patriots.
(c) The Society of Enlightened Communist Workers.
(d) The Society for the Well-Being of Mankind.

Short Answer Questions

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

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

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

4. What did Delta, in his enthusiasm, love?

5. Beta described the concentration camp as he saw it; how should he have described it?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. 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?

3. 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?

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

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

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

8. Under communist rule, education is from a strictly materialistic view. Why is this necessary to maintain proper thought among the citizens?

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

10. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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