Michał Habdank-Wojnicz was born in the town of Telšiai in present-day Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Polish noble family.

[1] He attended a gimnazjum in Suwałki (a town in northeastern Poland), then studied at the university of Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow.

In 1886, after a failed attempt to free fellow-conspirators Piotr Bardowski [pl] (1846–1886) and Stanisław Kunicki (1861–1886), who had both been sentenced to death, from the Warsaw Citadel, he was arrested by the Russian police.

[6][7] In June 1890 he escaped from Siberia and travelling west by train got to Hamburg, eventually arriving in London in October 1890.

[8] Under the assumed name of Ivan Kel'chevskii at first, he worked with Sergius Stepniak, a fellow revolutionary, under the banner of the anti-tsarist Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in London.

[13] The most famous of Voynich's possessions was a mysterious manuscript he said he acquired in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone in Italy, but first presented in public in 1915.