Antonovich, Vladimir Bonifatevich

Born Feb. 18 (Mar. 2), 1834, in Makhnovka, Berdichev District, Kiev Province; died Mar. 8 (21), 1908, in Kiev. Ukrainian historian, archaeologist, and ethnologist. One of the founders of Ukrainian bourgeois historiography.

From 1863 to 1880, Antonovich was chief editor of the Temporary Commission on Examining Ancient Documents in Kiev, and in 1878 he became professor of Russian history at the University of Kiev. He was director of the publication Archives of Southwestern Russia and published several volumes with introductory monographs (part 3, vols. 1 and 2— The Cossacks; part 3, vol. 3— The Haidamak Movement; Part 5, vol. 1— The Cities). He published his research on the history of the Ukraine and of the Lithuanian-Russian state in a separate collection: Monographs on the History of Western and Southwestern Russia (vol. 1, 1885). His works on the archaeology of the Ukraine are Antiquities of the Southwestern Region: Excavations in the Land of the Drevliane (1893), Archaeological Maps of Kiev Province (1895), and Archaeological Maps of Volynia Province (1900). He published, jointly with M. P. Dragomanov, Historic Songs of the Little Russian People (vols. 1–2, 1874–75). Antonovich interpreted social history from the point of view of idealist philosophy and analyzed it in terms of abstract principles—communal principles and those of the princely retinue and the princes. He made a sharp distinction between the Ukrainian and the Russian peoples, idealized the cossacks, and elaborated a nationalistic theory to the effect that the Ukrainian people are classless and “democratic.”