Na proshchu do ridnoï zemli Book

This seventeenth-century description of Ukraine by the Frenchman Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan stands out as one of the earliest and most colorful of the West-European descriptions of Ukraine and the Cossacks. The present volume contains an English translation of the original French text (Description d'Ukranie) with reproductions of the original illustrations, an introduction by the translators, in which the circumstances of Beauplan's stay in Ukraine, his work as a cartographer and author, and the hisotry of his maps and the Description d'Ukranie are discussed. Included is a representative selection of Beauplan's maps of Ukraine and a gazeteer keyed to those maps. This work is indispensable for scholars of Ukrainian history and the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and to all those interested in Ukraine and her past. The English translation is the third part of a joint US-Ukraine publishing collaboration, the first of its kind. A facsimile reproduction and Ukrainian language translation (with scholarly commentary on Beauplan and the text) have been produced in Ukraine by the Archeographic Commission of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences through the publishing house Naukova dumka.