On October 2, 1921, Polish readers could learn from the pages of "Rzeczpospolita" about the discovery and identification of a valuable manuscript by a certain Pole. Our fellow countryman was called Wilfrid (Michał) Wojnicz, an emigrant antiquarian. He recognized the manuscript as the work of the 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon — a genius with wide interests, "whom his enemies persecuted as a sorcerer and a pest of the holy Church" and who allegedly decided to encrypt his discoveries concerning the cosmos and the human body.
The code had not been cracked by either French, or English cryptographers before, and the Pole was helped only by a researcher from the USA, WR Newbold. Yet this interpretation also turned out to be incorrect! The secret of the manuscript has not been discovered to this day, although a growing group of scientists and enthusiasts are interested in it. Radiocarbon testing showed that the book dates back to the 15th century. Hypotheses indicating that it was the work of heretical Cathars, Aztecs, or the pious nun Hildegard of Bingen, have also been dispelled…
One of the pages of the Voynich Manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)
Numerous cryptographers (even those working on ciphers during World War II), historians, specialists in other fields (e.g. botanists looking at strange plants in the illustrations from the manuscript), enthusiasts and mystery hunters have not proposed any convincing and complete solution to the mystery for over a hundred years. There was even a radical hypothesis that the manuscript is not a work on herbs, astronomy, female physiology, and pharmacology — as the drawings accompanying the incomprehensible sequences of letters might suggest — but gibberish that does not make much sense. Today, the manuscript is an artifact shrouded in fame, appearing in documentaries and thriller-adventure books.
Meanwhile, the very life of Wilfrid Michael Voynich – in the shadow of the manuscript which he pompously “revealed” in 1915 during an exhibition in Chicago – is full of secrets and puzzles, probably no longer solvable.
Revolutionary
He was born in 1865 in Telšiai in Samogitia as Michał "Wilfryd" Wojnicz of the Habdank coat of arms. He considered himself a Pole. He attended high school in Suwałki and then studied to be a pharmacist in Moscow. There he came into contact with Russian revolutionaries – the National Volunteers, who became famous for, among other things, the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
Wojnicz also got carried away by the revolutionary atmosphere. Having met members of Ludwik Waryński's Great Proletariat, who were in contact with the National Volunteers, the young patriot came to Warsaw. Supposedly a quiet pharmacist, in reality he was active in the underground. At that time he met, among others, Józef Piłsudski, two years younger, who was also fascinated by the National Volunteers. In Warsaw, Wojnicz and conspirators associated with the Proletariat planned to free their comrades imprisoned there from the X Pavilion of the Citadel.
The plan failed, and Wojnicz, captured by the Tsarist services, joined the prisoners. While sitting in a cell in the Citadel, looking longingly out the window, he supposedly saw a young lady walking by the Vistula, who made a deep impression on him. As it turned out later, it was Ethel Lilian Boole – a young lady from a good family [daughter of mathematician George Boole – ed.], who had studied Slavic studies in Berlin and travelled around Eastern Europe, visiting places such as St. Petersburg and Warsaw. When they met later, she would become his wife.
Ethel Lilian Voynich (Source: Wikipedia)
Meanwhile, from the Citadel, the Tsarist authorities exiled him to Siberia, near Irkutsk, from where Voynich managed to escape, making his way to Mongolia, China, and from there to Hamburg and England. There he found Sergei Kravchinsky, codename Stepnyak – a famous Russian revolutionary-terrorist, to whom his colleagues in exile had given him contact.
It was there that he met the beautiful girl he had first seen through the window of the Citadel. They bonded, she took his surname, and in time became the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the 1897 novel "The Gadfly", beloved in the USSR.
They both decided to abandon their revolutionary ambitions, and he transformed into an enterprising antiquarian. In the photos, Wojnicz looked exactly like Dean Corso at the time – the hunter of valuable books from Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999), played by Johnny Depp.
Wilfrid Wojnicz (left, circa 1885) and Johnny Depp as Dean Corso in Polanski's 1999 film "The Ninth Gate" (Source: Wikipedia/DlaPolonii.pl)
A Clever Antiquarian
The key to Voynich's success in this industry turned out to be his acquaintance with Richard Garnett, who looked after the book collections at the British Museum. The idea for the business was simple: Voynich would travel and buy rare incunabula, then sell them in London. During his entire career, he sold as many as 3,800 such books to the British Museum. Like Dean Corso, he was not above trickery.
As Prof. Jan Władysław Woś writes, Voynich had a special talent for selecting excellently prepared and enterprising collaborators.
They operated throughout Europe. They entered the attics and basements of royal, cardinal and bishop palaces, as well as the residences of the aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie, and there, among various bits and pieces deemed unnecessary, they found many extremely rare prints, and sometimes even manuscripts, which they bought, often saving them from certain destruction. Voynich's associates did not believe the assurances that there was nothing interesting in the attic, or in the junk room, they climbed in, rummaged (not without bribes and trickery), then — if they found something worthy of attention — negotiations were held with the owners and the valuable loot was transported to one of Voynich's antiquarian bookshops.
It was probably thanks to this that the Polish antiquarian came into possession of the famous manuscript, which remains undeciphered to this day.
Wilfrid Wojnicz among books in his antiquarian bookshop in London's Soho. (Source: Wikipedia)
But Voynich's life in London was not only a successful business activity, but also a committed patriotic work. He gathered around himself a circle of compatriots who later served Poland well. August Zaleski (future president of the Republic of Poland in exile), Tytus Filipowicz (future diplomat, Piłsudski supporter), writer Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (future personal secretary of Marshal Piłsudski) worked for him. He was in touch with Maria Czaplicka (suffragette, anthropologist, researcher of Siberia), Aleksander Bolesław Brzostowski (former librarian of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski in Dresden), writer Joseph Conrad, and young Józef Retinger (acquaintance of Conrad, future advisor to Władysław Sikorski, originator of the Bilderberg Group and promoter of a united Europe).
Józef Piłsudski himself may have visited Wojnicz in London, and certainly his brother Bronisław – a former exile and researcher of the Ainu people from the Japanese Islands (which, years later, gave rise to quite improbable suspicions that the manuscript had something to do with the Ainu).
The Wojnicz manuscript changed owners several times, and is now in the collections of Yale University. Fortunately for the mystery hunters, the antiquarian did not give it to Polish institutions during his lifetime — nothing remained of Wojnicz's donations to the Warsaw Public Library: the entire collection was burned by the Nazis during the war.
However, work on deciphering the manuscript continues. Maybe artificial intelligence will help? Or maybe it will be possible to find a dozen or so missing pages from the manuscript somewhere? Let's hope that someone will finally solve the Voynich mystery.
Translation from Polish and fact-checking by Andrew Wozniewicz.
