Володимир Антонович

Activity: Science and Education, Politics
Date of Birth: January 6 (18), 1834
Date of Death: March 8 (21), 1908, Kyiv
Navigator: The Long Nineteenth Century

Historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, professor of the Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr, and co-founder of the Kyiv Hromada.

Volodymyr Antonovych, a descendant of Polish nobility, was a historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, professor at Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr, and one of the founders of the Kyiv Hromada. He was a figure who can be considered the creator of the very concept of a “New Ukraine.”
Antonovych became Ukrainian by political choice. While studying at Kyiv University, he organized the first Ukrainian Hromada from among the nobility of the Kyiv, Volhynian, and Podilian provinces, leaving the Polish community to join it. As a supposed “traitor to the Polish nation,” Volodymyr Antonovych was subjected to a public noble court. In response to accusations of betraying his Polish nationality, he published his famous article My Confession (1862 article) in 1862. It became a manifesto calling Polonized Ukrainian landowners to return to working for the benefit of the Ukrainian people. At the noble court, Antonovych declared that he was betraying no one but was returning to serve the people among whom he had grown up.
From 1863 to 1880 Antonovych served as editor of the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission. Under his editorship eight volumes of Archive of South-Western Russia were published. Under his leadership the commission released numerous archival documents that challenged Polish and Russian claims about the supposedly ancient belonging of Ukrainian lands to their empires. From 1878 until his death he served as professor of history at Kyiv University.
Developing the ideas of Mykola Kostomarov about the federal structure of Kyivan Rus, Antonovych and the scholarly school he created at Kyiv University began studying the history of each separate land that later formed Ukraine during the Lithuanian-Polish period. His main interest lay in territories populated by the ancient Rus’ ethnic community. The Kyiv principality was studied by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Volhynia by Pavlo Ivanov, Podillia by Nykandr Molchanovsky, Galicia by Mykola Dashkevych and Ivan Lynnychenko, the Siversk land by Petro Holubovsky and Dmytro Bahalii, Pereiaslav land by Vasyl Liaskoronsky, and the Turov-Pinsk land by Oleksandr Hrushevsky. By tracing the history of these regions to the fourteenth century, Antonovych’s students demonstrated the continuity between the early Ukrainian principalities and the later period of Lithuanian-Rus’ Ukraine.
After the failure to establish a center of scholarly and civic life in Kyiv around the South-Western branch of the Geographical Society and after a forced scholarly trip abroad in 1881, Antonovych turned his attention to Galicia and the need for Ukrainian-Polish understanding. Such cooperation, he believed, could transform Galicia into a center for the development and cultivation of a common Ukrainian culture.
Together with Oleksandr Konysky, Antonovych began to regard Galicia as an integral part of Ukrainian history. He initiated the idea of national unity between the regions of Dnipro Ukraine and the western Ukrainian lands.
Antonovych believed that Ukraine’s main task was to accumulate cultural and intellectual resources that would eventually enable it to demand cultural and political autonomy. His historical school rejected the central role of the state as a force that, under Ukrainian conditions, often opposed national needs. Instead, it emphasized the role of the people as the force capable of generating a new national elite and gaining autonomous rights for Ukraine.
At the same time, Antonovych did not oppose working people to wealthy individuals and did not support socialist transformations of society. Influential Ukrainian entrepreneurs such as Vasyl Symyrenko, Vsevolod Rubinstein, and William Berenshtam considered Antonovych the most trustworthy figure in the Ukrainian movement. In contrast to the revolutionary ambitions of Galician radicals, Antonovych advocated loyalty, legality, and cultural evolutionism, believing in the peaceful advancement of Ukraine’s rights among neighboring states with imperial traditions.
Antonovych also began forming a network of pro-Ukrainian history teachers: most of his students, after graduating from the university, became teachers in gymnasiums. In the later years of his life he resumed private lectures on Ukrainian history, which he delivered in his apartment for educated audiences without formal historical training. The aim was to cultivate elements of national historical memory among the intelligentsia. Two lecture courses were particularly devoted to this purpose: the history of Ukrainian Cossacks and the history of Ireland.
Antonovych presented the history of the Cossacks as inherently Ukrainian, in contrast to the Polonized history of western Podillia, Volhynia, and Galicia, where noble rule remained and the Cossack regimental and hetman systems did not spread. This course, recorded by listeners and published in 1897 in Chernivtsi under the title Conversations about the Cossack Times, became the first popular scientific overview of Ukrainian history widely used for educational purposes both in the Russian-ruled Ukrainian lands and in Galicia.
His course on Irish history was the first comparative historical course examining two European regions with similar national development. In it Antonovych compared the historical destinies and relations of the Irish and the English with those of Ukrainians and Russians. However, his view that language is not a necessary element of national identity was later used by Russian educational policy in the Dnipro region, where teaching in the Ukrainian language was prohibited.
Antonovych believed that evolutionary development was the only viable path for Ukraine. From the perspective of history, earlier accusations that he promoted “cultural work” instead of revolutionary action appear unfounded.
As a proponent of Ukrainian national unity, Antonovych worked to realize these ideas in practice together with Oleksandr Konysky and Oleksandr Barvinsky. They managed to coordinate the cultural revival in Galicia and in the Dnipro region, reaching agreement on a common language, shared spiritual values, and a unified interpretation of Ukrainian history.
Antonovych trained an entire school of Ukrainian historians known as the documentary school of Volodymyr Antonovych, which included more than one hundred scholars. Among his students were some of the most prominent Ukrainian historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Dmytro Bahalii, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Orest Levytsky, Mykola Dashkevych, and Ivan Kamanin. It was no coincidence that those close to him called him “the Beekeeper” (his Hromada pseudonym), valuing him as a collector of “bees” — young scholars and public figures who would later produce the “honey” of a developed all-Ukrainian culture through their collective work.

Brief Conclusions

Statesman and reformer — a public and political figure, co-founder and leader of the Kyiv Hromada. He believed that national consciousness is formed through knowledge of history and culture and therefore placed great importance on educational work.
Legislator — not a legislator in the modern sense, but an organizer of the first all-Ukrainian political organization, which later became the foundation for the Ukrainian Democratic Party.
Builder and patron — although not a traditional patron, he made a significant contribution to Ukrainian science and culture through his scholarly works and by founding the Kyiv school of historians.
Church policy — he treated religion with respect and demonstrated tolerance toward different confessions.
Legacy — developed a new methodology for archaeological excavations and laid the scientific foundation for Ukrainian archaeology as an independent discipline.

Author: Ihor Hyrych