A Description of Ukraine

This seventeenth-century work by the Frenchman Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan is one of the earliest and most colorful of the West European descriptions of Ukraine and the Cossacks. The present volume includes an English translation of the original French text, reproductions of the original illustrations, and an extensive introduction by the translators, in which they discuss the circumstances of Beauplan’s stay in Ukraine, his work as a cartographer and author, and the history of his maps and the Description d’Ukranie. A separate box contains a representative selection of Beauplan’s maps of Ukraine.

Indispensable for scholars of Ukrainian history and the history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, this edition will also be of great interest to the general reader. The English translation constitutes the third part of a joint U.S.–Ukraine publishing collaboration, the first of its kind. A facsimile reproduction and Ukrainian-language translation have been produced in Ukraine by the Institute of Ukrainian Archeography of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences through the publishing house Naukova dumka, and are available directly from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.