Naumovich was born into a clerical family in western Ukraine, which was at the time part of the Austrian Empire; his father was a school teacher, and his grandfather was a priest.

[2] Naumovich also founded the Kachkovsky Society,[4] the Russophile counterpart and rival to the pro-Ukrainian Prosvita, which involved creating pro-Russian reading rooms for Ruthenian peasants.

The intensity of Naumovich's pro-Russian activities earned the distrust of the Austrian authorities and of the Catholic Church; a seemingly minor incident in 1881 led to his downfall.

This event caught the attention of the Vatican and of the Austrian authorities in Vienna, who feared that it portended the beginning of large-scale conversion to Orthodoxy and to a Russian orientation.

An investigation proved that Ivan Naumovich, despite being a Greek Catholic priest, wrote the peasants' petition requesting conversion to Orthodoxy.

The demands included greater Polish control over lands at the expense of the Ukrainian rivals, who had declared their loyalty to Austria.

He identified the fact that "our kindheartedness and tact" towards the Austrian Emperor at the time of his defeat was less effective than the agitation of the Polish enemies.

This view of the situation eventually came to be accepted by most elements of Ukrainian society, even those (such as the Ukrainophiles) that did not follow Naumovich to the conclusion he drew in the second part of his article.

[1] In the second part of A Glimpse into the Future, Naumovich concluded that the failure of Ukrainian leaders could be traced to their efforts to create a new western Ruthenian nation.

He claimed that such efforts were in vain, and that from the perspective of ethnography, language, literature and ritual the people of Galicia, Kyiv, Moscow, Tobolsk, etc.