Volodymyr Bonifatiyovych Antonovych (Ukrainian: Володимир Боніфатійович Антонович; Polish: Włodzimierz Antonowicz; Russian: Влади́мир Бонифа́тьевич Антоно́вич, tr.

[4] In 1857, he co-founded[6] the Związek Trojnicki ("Triple Society"), named after the three Polish territories acquired by Russia in the 18th century: Volhynia, Podilia and the Kyiv area.

The society's goal was promoting the abolition of serfdom and persuading the peasants to support Polish independence, while preparing the members for their role in the planned all-national uprising.

[7] Due to his involvement, Antonowicz became one of the prominent examples of the "peasant-lovers" (or "Reds"), a loose group of young artists and liberal thinkers fascinated with the peasantry as the "core of the nation".

[3][10] This conflict further strengthened Antonowicz's pro-Ukrainian stance on one side, and the animosity between him and his colleagues on the other, to the extent that he was considered a "renegade" by some.

[4] During his work in the commission, Antonovych edited and published nine volumes of his "Archives of South-Western Russia", a compendium of the history of Right-bank Ukraine during the 16th-18th centuries.

In addition to being a populist, he was a pioneer of positivist methodology in history, the founder of the so-called "Kyiv Documentalist School" of Ukrainian historians, and mentor to Mykhailo Hrushevsky[citation needed] and Kateryna Antonovych-Melnyk.

[4] In February 1870, the Kyiv University stewardship council confirmed him as a magister of Russian history for his dissertation "Last days of Cossackdom on the right bank of the Dnieper".

[4] Among Antonovych's students were Pyotr Golubovsky,[13] Dmytro Bahaliy,[14] Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Mytrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky and Ivan Lynnychenko.

[15] His wife was Kateryna Antonovych-Melnyk (2 December 1859 – 12 January 1942) who was a Ukrainian historian and archaeologist from the city of Khorol (today – Poltava Oblast).