Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest recorded sentence in Polish reads "Day ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai," meaning "Let me grind, and you take a rest." It was written down in the Latin chronicle Liber fundationis, composed between 1269 and 1273 by an abbot named Piotr, recording a Cistercian monastery's history in Henryków, Silesia. The sentence was reportedly spoken by a Bohemian settler named Bogwal to his wife.
Six writers connected to Polish literary tradition have won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905, Władysław Reymont in 1924, Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978 (writing in Yiddish), Czesław Miłosz in 1980, Wisława Szymborska in 1996, and Olga Tokarczuk in 2018 (awarded 2019).
Polish Romanticism was primarily a movement for independence against foreign occupation rather than an exploration of nature or individual feeling. Poland ceased to exist as a sovereign state after the Third Partition in 1795, and Romantic writers addressed national survival, exile, and the struggle to regain sovereignty. The movement ended with the Tsarist suppression of the January 1863 Uprising, marked by public executions and deportations to Siberia.
Sienkiewicz's most celebrated works include the Trilogy -- With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886), and Pan Michael (1888) -- as well as Quo Vadis (1896) and The Knights of the Cross (1900). He wrote the Trilogy, in his own words, to lift up the heart of the Polish nation during the era of the partitions, favoring heroic action over historical accuracy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 and dedicated it to his identity as a citizen of Poland, which at the time did not officially exist.
All official cultural institutions were shut down and all literary outlets were forced to cease operation. Writers organized secret readings and underground presses in Warsaw, Kraków, and Lwów; out of 1,500 clandestine publications circulating in occupied Poland, around 200 were devoted to literature. Much of the literature written during the occupation could only appear in print after the war ended.
Adam Mickiewicz, who lived from 1798 to 1855, was the most celebrated poet of Polish Romanticism and is recognized in both of the movement's two distinct periods. He embodied the concept of the poeta-wieszcz, or nation's bard, which meant serving as a spiritual leader to a people living under foreign occupation. His major works include Dziady and Pan Tadeusz.