Page 81 - EXPOTIME!Sept2017

Fakes and forgeries — Illicit traffic of looted heritage Fakes and forgeries — Illicit traffic of looted heritage

Michal Habdank-Wojnicz his business was used to raise funds for the Polish-Rus-
sian freedom struggle. Nowadays one would say that
Another approach to counterfeit detection is to deal the business was a money laundering machine for Polish
with the alleged finder of manuscripts in question to and Russian freedom fighters, because Habdank-Wojnicz
determine whether his statements and assumptions are must have implemented millions, but had been personal-
credible and plausible. There is, for instance, the curi- ly destitute. In addition, he was regarded as an extremely
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ous circumstance that Habdank-Wojnicz has never shown bad payer among antiquarian colleagues. According to
how he actually came into possession of the book. In Roitzsch, it was also known to the British secret service
his report of 1921 (published 9 years later!), the later that Habdank-Wojnicz and his wife used his bookselling
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Voynich merely writes: "Although I could not be certain premises for conspirative meetings. Conspirative be-
of its authorship, the fact that this was a thirteenth cen- haviour was therefore not alien to Habdank-Wojnicz, he
tury manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be used for example the aka "Ivan Klecevsky"for his under-
a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge ground activities in London.
the existence of the manuscript of such an early date
written entirely in cipher was unknown, so I included Another aspect is interesting. In 1902, he married Ethel
it among the manuscripts which I purchased from this Lilian Boole, a musician whom he had already learned
collection. (nota: ...I refrain from giving details about during his student period in St. Petersburg (the Warsaw
the locality of the castle)". To find the form of purchase, story does not sound credible). She was the daughter
however, seems to be impossible since there are no of the famous English mathematician George Boole. She
sources. Voynich did obviously not emphasize receipts thought politically similar to him, and he had also been
and lists during his shopping sprees to Italian and Corsi- named, along with the revolutionary Sergius Stepniak, as
can monasteries. a contact address in London. Later she translated Marx
and Engels into Russian and smuggled the translations
The later Anglisised Michael Voynich is Michal Hab- into Russia.
dank-Wojnicz (the Christian name Wilfryd might be an
AKA or penname), born on 31 October 1865 in the then It was after this underground period that the "discov-
Russian, now Lithuanian Telcze/Telsiai. 10,11 According to ery"of the "Voynich manuscript"took place in 1912. In
other sources, however, he was born in the Belorussian his later report, Habdank-Wojnicz spreaded the mantle
Hrodna/Grodno. 11a In his later life he made himself a of silence over the actual location, explicitly because
"Wilfried de Voynich", which is all the more astonishing he wanted to buy further books from that source. This
as the real name of the Polish noble familiy was Habdank reason can, of course, have been a defensive lie if he
or Abdank, and Wojnicz merely described a very small wanted to avoid any embarrassing development. The so-
town in the south of Poland. called find spot, the Jesuit Villa Mondragone in Monte
Porzio Catone (now part of the University of Rome) was
Additionally, it is not unimportant that Michal Hab- in fact a castle rather than a villa.
dank-Wojnicz first studied chemistry in Warsaw, St. Pe-
tersburg and Moscow, and obtained a license as a phar- Habkank-Wojnicz never tried to decipher the secret lan-
macist. As a polyhistor, he must in any case have come guage of the book, but he always wanted to determine
into contact with the phenomenon of alchemy. Politi- age and authorship. Ultimately, however, just to sell his
cally, he was on the side of the Polish national move- objet trouvé some day at the highest price possible. This
ment (Proletarjat, Narodnaya Volia, then the Society of seems to have been the reason why he was not inter-
Friends of Russian Freedom), which was directed against ested in selling the mysterious manuscript to Richard
the Russian occupation, and worked for the internation- Garnet, the British Museum Reading Room keeper who
al underground. At the age of 20, he was imprisoned was always interested in a cheap acquisition of books
for two years in Warsaw, because he was accused of at- offered by Habdank-Wojnicz: the complete content of
th
tempting to free two death-denied comrades. The Rus- Habdank-Wojnicz 8 antiquarian catalog was bought by
sians then sent him to the exile to Irkutsk in Siberia, but Garnet completely with sponsors (because he offered
he managed to flee and set off in 1890 with a fake pass just half the sum Habdank-Wojnicz was claiming). In so
across Europe via Hamburg to England. Habdank-Wojnicz far, the British Museum was certainly engaged in the rev-
reached London poor as a church mouse. He was there- olutionary history of Europe...
fore not alien to use forged documents when it seemed
to him useful. As early as 1895, Habdank-Wojnicz seemed to have
stopped all revolutionary activities when Stepniak was
At the end of the 1890s, Habdank-Wojnicz opened an an- killed in a train accident. After the communist revolution
tique bookshop in London, which was astonishingly suc- in Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1915 and
cessful. Soon he opened offices in Florence, Paris and died in New York in 1930, quite impoverished. The Polish
Warsaw. It seems, however, that the economic success socialist Stefan Juszczynski, who knew Habdank-Wojnicz
of the antiquarian was also due to the fact that revolu- personally, wrote about him: "He [Wojnicz] had exuber-
tionary literature had been distributed there and that ant phantasy and took its results for reality, in which he
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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017