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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Why was Gamma's writing weak?

2. During Gamma's youth, Poland gradually separated along what lines?

3. As he got older, how did Gamma feel about his life?

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

5. As the Polish fought the Germans for control of Warsaw near the end of the war, how did a few people manage to survive?

Short Essay Questions

1. 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?

2. How could Delta, who was not racist, write such violently anti-Semitic material?

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

4. How was Delta able to play the game that the center demanded of him--and be better at it?

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

6. 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?

7. 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?

8. Delta, in wandering the roads in France, met people from many different nations. How did this universal migration prepare the way even more for communist rule?

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

10. 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?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

It would seem that the exciting and invigorating power of this participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues" (66). How does this need, which springs up in aesthetic Ketman, drive a man's life? Party officials consider the need for strangeness a relic of the past, but how does this miss the truth of what's happening? What are the benefits of interacting within a bustling, changing environment?

Essay Topic 2

Milosz begins Chapter 4 by saying that the ethical and moral considerations that helped man make decisions in the past have become merely theoretical, inconsequential in the face of changes. What does this say about the changes brought on Eastern Europe from the mid-1930s onward? Given what you know of European history, how were these changes radically different from anything that had come before?

Essay Topic 3

Prompted by Lieutenant Zbyszek's sign in the wilderness of bombed Warsaw, Alpha and Milosz reflect on the man who wrote it. What is Milosz's response, emotionally and mentally, to the sign? Using other examples from the book (e.g., the Jewish girl shot in the street or Delta's life), explain what Milosz presents about the permanence of an individual life.

(see the answer keys)

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