Volodymyr Antonovych
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Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-01-18, vil. Makhnivka, Kiev Guberniya - 1908-03-21, Kiev), was a prominent Ukrainian historian and one of the leaders of the Ukrainian national awakening in the Russian Empire.
As a historian, Antonovych, who was longtime Professor of History at the University of Kiev, represented a populist approach to Ukrainian history. This approach, which earlier had been exemplified by another historian, Mykola Kostomarov (Nikolay Kostomarov), took the side of the common people in the recurrent conflicts between the state and the people which had characterized Ukrainian history over the centuries. Kostomarov, Antonovych, and other populist historians saw the spirit of the nation as embedded in the Ukrainian folk, and saw and the various states that had ruled Ukraine as being exterior to this folk and somewhat foreign.
With regard to the leadership of Antonovych in the Ukrainian national movement, in the 1860s he was a leader of the so-called "peasant-lovers" (Khlopomany) who criticized the largely Polonized gentry of right-bank Ukraine for betraying the national cause and exploiting the peasantry. Antonovych, who himself was of Polish gentry origin from the right-bank, and had probably been influenced by boyhood reading of the pro-Cossack novels of the Polish emigre from right-bank Ukraine, Michał Czajkowski, clearly went over to the Ukrainians at this time. Thereafter, he led the "Old Community" (stara hromada) in Kiev doing cautious Ukrainian cultural and educational work under the autocratic Russian Imperial regime.
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 "Kiev Documentalist School" of Ukrainian historians, and mentor of the most famous of these, Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
