Volodymyr Antonovych

Volodymyr Bonifatiyovych Antonovych (; ; , tr. Vladímir Bonifát'evich Antonóvich; – ) was a prominent Ukrainian historian, archivist and archaeologist, who was known as one of the most prominent figures of the Ukrainian national revival movement in the Russian Empire. Antonovych was a longtime Professor of Russian history at Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev and a correspondent-member of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences. His main work was an edition of the eight-section Archives of South-Western Russia, as head of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission.

Early life Antonovych was born as Włodzimierz Antonowicz on , in the village of Makhnivka, in the Berdichevsky Uyezd of Kiev Governorate, (now Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine) to a landless family of impoverished teachers descended from Polish gentry; Antonovych claimed ancestry to the princely Lubomirski family through his mother. According to his contemporary Franciszek Rawita-Gawroński, Antonovych on various occasions claimed his father was either a Pole named Bolesław Antonowicz or a Hungarian wanderer named János Diday. Viktor Korotkyi, a historian specializing in the history of Kyiv University, believed the latter to be Antonovych's biological father.

His mother, Monika Gurska, was a governess. the Związek Trojnicki ("Triple Society"), named after the three Polish territories acquired by Russia in the 18th century: Volhynia, Podilia and the Kyiv area. The society's goal was promoting the abolition of serfdom and persuading the peasants to support Polish independence, while preparing the members for their role in the planned all-national uprising. Due to his involvement, Antonowicz became one of the prominent examples of the "peasant-lovers" (or "Reds"), a loose group of young artists and liberal thinkers fascinated with the peasantry as the "core of the nation".

However, when the January Uprising finally started, the Society divided. Antonowicz, highly critical of the bourgeoisie and the szlachta, sided with the lower classes and left the society, instead forming a Ukrainian society called the Kyiv Community (Київська громада). The conflict between Antonowicz and his university colleagues was further aggravated by the conflict over the Polish language. While most democratic societies decided to appeal to the tsar and ask for the Polish language to be promoted to the status of language of instruction, Antonowicz ultimately opposed those plans. This conflict further strengthened Antonowicz's pro-Ukrainian stance on one side, and the animosity between him and his colleagues on the other, to the extent that he was considered a "renegade" by some.

In 1861 he changed his name to its Ukrainized form and converted to the Orthodox faith, common among the peasants living around Kyiv, as opposed to the Catholicism of the higher class of local society He also married Varvara Ivanovna Mikhels, and started to teach Latin in the 1st Kyiv Gymnasium.

In 1897, together with the Ukrainian nobleman Oleksandr Konysky, he established the All-Ukrainian Public Organization.

Personal views Throughout his career, the imperial censors and oppressive political atmosphere prevented Antonovych from openly expressing his political views, which tended to be egalitarian and somewhat anarchistic. In addition to being a populist, he was a pioneer of positivist methodology in history, the founder of the so-called "Kyiv Documentalist School" of Ukrainian historians, and mentor to Mykhailo Hrushevsky Dmytro Bahaliy, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Mytrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky and Ivan Lynnychenko.

Personal life His wife was Kateryna Antonovych-Melnyk (2 December 1859 – 12 January 1942) who was a Ukrainian historian and archaeologist from the city of Khorol (today – Poltava Oblast). In the 1880s she participated in the archaeological excavations near Shumsk (today – Ternopil Oblast) and in 1885, she visited Ternopil during her travel around the region. Since 1919, Kateryna worked in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Volodymyr Antonovych is the father to former Ukrainian minister (and cultural historian in Prague) Dmytro Antonovych