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

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

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

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What was the end result of Gamma's poetry?

2. In Milosz's understanding, the class of the bourgeois is comprised of what people?

3. Why did Beta's writing assert that communism was salvation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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