Polish Literature

Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages, used in Poland over the centuries, have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Yiddish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and Esperanto. Until the early 18th century, a major language of Polish literature was Latin, widely popular across all of Western and Central Europe at the time.

For centuries – wrote Czesław Miłosz – Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction (dominant in the English speaking world). The reasons were manifold, but mostly, rested on historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write including historical cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, as the crossroads of Europe; but also, Polish own collective incongruities demanding adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.