Background
Wilfrid Michał Habdank-Wojnicz was born in Telsze (since 1918 Telšiai—a town in then Kovno Governorate, which was part of the Russian Empire)—into a Polish noble family. He was the son of a Polish petty official (titular counsellor).
Wilfrid Michał Habdank-Wojnicz was born in Telsze (since 1918 Telšiai—a town in then Kovno Governorate, which was part of the Russian Empire)—into a Polish noble family. He was the son of a Polish petty official (titular counsellor).
He attended a gimnazjum / liceum (junior grammar school/prep school) in Suwałki (a town in northeastern Poland), then studied at the universities of Warsaw, Saint St. Petersburg, and Moscow. He graduated from Moscow University in chemistry and became a licensed pharmacist.
The "Habdank" part of his surname is the name of a Polish heraldic clan. In 1885, in Warsaw, Wojnicz joined Ludwik Waryński"s revolutionary organization, Proletariat. In 1886, after a failed attempt to free fellow-conspirators Piotr Bardowski (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.
In 1887, he was sent to penal servitude at Tunka.
In 1890 he escaped from Siberia and got to Peking/Beijing and, returning to Europe, eventually went from Hamburg to London. Under the assumed name of Ivan Kel"chevskii, he helped Stepniak, a fellow revolutionary, to found the Society of Friends for a Free Russia in London.
After Stepniak"s death in a railway crossing accident in 1895, Voynich ceased revolutionary activity. In 1898 he opened a bookshop in London.
Voynich was naturalised a British subject on 25 April 1904, taking the legal name Wilfrid Michael Voynich.
Voynich opened another bookshop in 1914 in New New York He became deeply involved in the antiquarian book trade, and wrote a number of catalogues and other texts on the subject. Voynich died in New York in 1930.
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.
He owned the manuscript until his death. lieutenant is written in an unknown script.