His father, Pavel Grigor'evich Antsiferov (1851–1897) was a state counsellor and the son of a naval officer in Arkhangelsk, who took a post as an inspector of agriculture and horticulture at an institute in Uman, and later was the director of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden in Crimea from 1891.
Beginning in 1915 he studied at the historical-philological department of Petrograd Imperial University, where I. M. Grevs was his teacher.
In 1921, on I. M. Grevets' initiative, the Petrograd Scientific-research excursion institute opened, which was located in building 3 on Simeonovskaia (now Belinskii) Street.
After the liquidation of the Tour Institute in September 1924, he moved to the Petrograd branch of the Central Regional Studies Bureau (TsBK) formed in January 1922.
In the spring of 1925 he was arrested, sentenced to three years exile, and sent to Omsk, but after three months was freed and returned to Leningrad.
On May 3, 1930 he was arrested in the camp as a "participant of a counter-revolutionary organization" and sent in isolation to the Sekirnaia Mountain in the Solovetsky Islands and for further investigation was sent to Leningrad.
In 1944 he defended his dissertation at the Gorky Institute of World Literature for the degree of candidate of philological sciences on "The Problem of Urbanism in Fiction."
He authored a large number of works on the history of St. Petersburg, methodology, and the organization of excursions.