Our Notes & References

The first German edition of the celebrated first book on Ukraine, during 150 years the “primary source of concrete information, both strategic and anthropological, on the region and its inhabitants” (Essar & Pernal 1990), with firsthand accounts of Cossack and Muslim Tatar life and culture.

Originally published in French in 1651, Beauplan’s description of Ukraine became a very popular work and appeared in approximately 26 editions in nine different languages all the way up to 1981.

This German edition is based on the enlarged 1660 French edition, and is the first translation to be published as a separate book, and not within a collection of other accounts. Published when Catherine’s Russia had conquered Ukraine from the Ottomans, it adds interesting material absent from the first edition and suited to a German audience: an almost 80-pp. excerpt from the diary of Prince Maximilian Emanuel of Württemberg (1689-1709), a friend of Charles XII of Sweden, which details the Prince’s campaign alongside Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709), the legendary hetman of the Zaporozhian host. Mazepa defected from Peter the Great’s service but was defeated at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. The Prince was wounded in the same battle and died shortly afterward; his surviving journal entries comprise a valuable primary source, in incredibly vivid detail, of everyday scenes from the campaign and the exploits of Mazepa himself.

A lovely example, in contemporary boards, of this rare edition: we could trace only another copy on the market in recent decades, more than 10 years ago at auction. Only 3 copies in US institutions according to WorldCat (Dartmouth, Harvard and Univ. Minnesota).

Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan (1600-1673) was a French-Polish cartographer, military engineer and architect. Up until 1630 he lived and worked in Rouen, becoming, under somewhat hazy circumstances, the Sieur du Beauplan, before deciding to seek further fortune in distant Poland-Lithuania. Beauplan participated in the battles against Muscovy, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire that left the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest territorial extent. Beauplan subsequently drew the first descriptive map of Ukraine in 1639. Interestingly for the context of this book, which heavily features the lifestyle and culture of the Cossacks, he also participated in the suppression of at least two Cossack uprisings in 1637 and 1640.

Beauplan’s book, originally published in 1651, tackles a vast range of subject matters including Cossack electoral practices, the construction of seafaring vessels and naval warfare, sexual mores, costume, music and dancing. The narrative also has a timeless quality and reflects the dangers of travel, disease and exposure — in one memorable passage Beauplan recounts the freezing temperatures of the region around the Vistula Gorge, where “two of [his] acquaintances lost their most sensitive part in a very short time” (p.121, our translation).

His assessment of the Cossacks and their way of life is a mix of grudging respect and criticism. Equally interesting is his extensive experience and fascinating ethnographic details of the Tatars (‘Mahomedans’), including their recipes with horsemeat, their various homemade spirits, and their practice of slaving raids to then sell the Slav prisoners in Jaffa.

This first edition in German appeared about 40 years before the first Polish (1822) and 50 years before the first Russian (1832).

Kept in an attractive original condition, our copy is complete, with its engraved plate uncut and showing illustrations numbered 1-3 and one not numbered; some copies include the plate cut in two, sometimes collated as two separate plates (cf. Essar & Pernal).

Bibliography

Cat. Russica B-429; Essar & Pernal 16 [ie. Essar, D. F., and A. B. Pernal. 1982. ‘Beauplan’s “Description d’Ukranie”: A Bibliography of Editions and Translations’. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6 (4): 485–99.]; Beauplan, Guillaume Le Vasseur. 1990. ‘La Description d’Ukranie’. Edited by Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar. Études Ukrainiennes de l’Université d’Ottawa, No 11. Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa; Borschak, Elie. 2009. ‘Beauplan, Guillaume Le Vasseur De’, in Davis, Robert H., Edward Kasinec, M. G. (Mikhail Grigorevich) Kurdiumov, et al. 1896. Russkii biograficheskii slovarʹ. Izd. Imp. russk. ist. obshchestva; Essar, Dennis F., and Andrew B. Pernal. 1990. ‘The First Edition (1651) of Beauplan’s Description d’Ukranie’. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 14 (1/2): 84–96.