The travails of a Swiss philanthropist and Ukrainian scholar-translator to publish a unique book

Kyiv’s Osnovy Publishers has issued Pilgrimage to the Holy Places of the East From 1723 Through 1747 by Vasyl Hryhorovych-Barsky. The translation of the text from Old Ukrainian was done by Professor of Philology in the Ukrainian Literature Department of the Ivan Franko Zhytomyr State University Petro V. Bilous.

Over twenty years ago the then young teacher of literature at a teacher’s college, now Professor Bilous discovered for himself the name of Hryhorovych-Barsky whose life and work became the topic of his doctoral dissertation. This traveler of the first half of the eighteenth century was little known even among specialists in the literature of the period and his work had been completely neglected. This work by a wayfarer, who spent half his life on arduous travels over Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, is unique in Ukrainian culture. Hryhorovych-Barsky left hundreds of pages of fascinating travelogues as well as about 150 graphic drawings. The manuscript and most of the drawings have fortunately been preserved to our day, while the work went through seven printings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was considered the honor to have the book of Hryhorovych- Barsky’s wanderings in the library of any cultured family. In the twentieth century the name of this sojourner has been forgotten and his book neglected.

With his scholarly research published as monograph in 1985 Prof. Bilous resurrected the name and activity of this outstanding Ukrainian, a graduate of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. Some years later, as Ukraine was undergoing a wave of national cultural rebirth, the Ukrayinsky Pysmennyk (Ukrainian Writer) Publishing House decided to publish the translation into contemporary Ukrainian of Hryhorovych-Barsky’s travels and hired Prof. Bilous to do the translation. Our intrepid scholar was to translate over a thousand pages of text within a year. And this was under such condition that the text was not available in Zhytomyr, and Kyiv libraries would not allow this rare book to be checked out. Only the author of the translation himself knows how many purely technical obstacles he had to overcome at his own cost to fulfill his job within the one year mandated by contract. And when the book was already prepared for printing, the processes began that led to hyperinflation and the collapse of the publishing business. For years the translation, almost a thousand typed pages, gathered dust in the skeleton remaining of the publishers, whence Bilous later withdrew it with this author present in hopes for better times.

Those times finally came last year when one Pavlo Skalenko, a Ukrainian now living in Zurich, decided to do Ukraine a good turn in conjunction with the 2000th anniversary of Christ’s Nativity. Due to a conjunction of fortunate circumstances the unpublished manuscript came to his attention. He put up his own cash for its publication, and Osnovy went to work. In less than a year the book was born and immediately was marked as one the year’s best by Lviv’s Forum of Publishers. Edited by Mykhailo Moskalenko, with a preface by famed historian Prof. Orest Subtelny, and with summary and commentary by Petro Bilous, Pilgrimage to the Holy Places of the East From 1723 Through 1747 came into the world and has already met wide response in Ukraine’s scholarly and cultural circles. Like its author, the book has also traveled abroad. This wonderfully classically designed tome of almost 800 pages has already been dubbed by experts and bibliophiles alike a major cultural event.