Pauline Letter

Andrew Melnyk (1975-80) writes from Columbia, Missouri

When the Russian army rolled into Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, I wasn’t only angry at Putin’s Russia, and fearful for the future; I was also full of admiration for the extraordinary courage and defiant spirit of the Ukrainians. Though President Zelensky looked to be just days away from death, he stayed put; women and hipsters were learning to shoot; the defenders of Snake Island were faced with destruction but didn’t flinch. So, I was full of admiration, as I say, but that wasn’t all: I also felt intensely proud.

One cannot be morally responsible for actions that one didn’t do, and to be proud is to be proud of something that one was morally responsible for doing. Pride in other people’s actions, in which one played no part, therefore seems irrational. Likewise, of course, for feeling ashamed of others’ sins. But pride and shame are all but inevitable given the right sort of connection to the actors. My father was Ukrainian, and grew up in eastern Poland, in a tiny village close to Przemysl, now a modest town on the border with Ukraine that was mentioned in early news reports of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Poland. Toward the end of the Second World War, while still a teenager, he fled his homeland, together with an aunt and uncle, as the front line of war and Soviet communist rule relentlessly approached from the east. After the war, he lived in camps for ‘Displaced Persons’ in Bavaria and made money by clearing the rubble left by Allied bombing. These camps gave birth to elaborate educational institutions, and it was there that he completed his secondary education and began studying pharmacy. But the money ran out, and so in 1948 or 1949 he emigrated to England, probably under the European Voluntary Workers scheme. His two older brothers had similar stories. One emigrated to Sweden, and the other, after two years as a political prisoner in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, moved to Belgium and then the United States.

My father died in 1977 when I was fifteen. He looked foreign (to Britons of the time) and spoke English with a heavy accent, but he assimilated to the British way of life as much as he could, eventually taking UK citizenship. He made no effort to teach me Ukrainian, and never spoke to me of the old country or his past; I assume he wished to forget it. But my mother was English, and I was brought up in southwest London, so inevitably I grew up feeling British, and have often, indeed, been regarded as something of a textbook Englishman. I have never learned Ukrainian. It came as a bit of a shock to discover that I felt Ukrainian.

I learned of my father’s death over the phone in a farmhouse while on a St Paul’s School Mountaineering Club trip in North Wales. Before I took the train home, the masters leading the trip showed me immense kindness. Patience, too, as I talked and talked and talked. Their care impressed me deeply, and my gratitude is undimmed 45 years later. (Alas, I can now remember only the name of Philip Rodgers). My father’s death also had obvious financial implications, but, thanks to the generosity of donors unknown to me, I was able to return to St Paul’s the next term to take my O-levels.

I learned of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a hotel room in Chicago, while attending a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I had organised some of the sessions, so I had duties to perform. But I found it hard to concentrate on them, and indeed to sleep. Putin was already rattling his nuclear sabre, there was Russia’s history of mass murder in Ukraine to consider, and the people in the photos I was seeing online looked like my relatives.

I was brought up in southwest London, so inevitably I grew up feeling British, and have often, indeed, been regarded as something of a textbook Englishman. I have never learned Ukrainian. It came as a bit of a shock to discover that I felt Ukrainian.

I am an academic philosopher by profession. As commonly happens with less wholesome obsessions, I discovered philosophy as a teenager, and St Paul’s played a key role. The first philosophy book I ever read—Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies—I had borrowed from a bookshelf in the chaplain’s classroom. I’m sure the book contained much that I didn’t understand, but it changed my life all the same: I found out that philosophy was what my mind was for. I’m grateful (though, in retrospect, surprised) not only that the book was on that shelf but that a master didn’t hesitate to lend it to me—I was later to learn from bitter experience that students who borrow books from their teachers often don’t get around to returning them.

And then in the UVIII we read the first book of Plato’s Republic. Or at least we started to read it. I wanted to scrutinise every thought so minutely that I tried the patience of my excellent classmates, Tim Burke (1975-80) (who died tragically young) and Anthony Woolich (197580). Our teacher, the future High Master, Stephen Baldock, then a mere master without the honorific of capitalisation, diplomatically moved us into a higher gear by suggesting that I would be able to pursue the sort of discussion I was interested in at university. And so, I did, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where I read Classical Mods and Greats, followed by two graduate degrees in philosophy.

To attend February’s academic conference in Chicago I did not fly from Britain. I drove from Columbia, Missouri, home of the University of Missouri and archetypal American college town (population: 125,000), where I am in my 32nd year as a professor of philosophy. For I am an immigrant too, like my father before me. (I also speak English with a heavy—British—accent!) But I have had an easier time of it than my father did. No one thinks I look foreign, no one is fazed by the spelling of my name, and, even in late middle age, I am still complimented on my accent (which is perhaps why, as one friend put it, I continue to sound as if I got off the boat yesterday).

The story of my immigration is also very different from that of my father’s. He emigrated and then fell in love (with my mother). For me, it was the other way around. I fell in love (with my future wife when we were graduate students at Oxford) and then emigrated to the land of her birth. But while that explains why I live in Columbia rather than Britain; it doesn’t explain why I live in Columbia rather than somewhere in the US that is – how should I put it? – better known. The answer is that the academic job market is national, indeed international, and tight, and you go where you get a good offer: of my ten philosophical colleagues at the University of Missouri two are Canadian, two are Romanian, and one is Irish. But I have never tried seriously to move. My department has been a great one in which to work, and Columbia a great town in which to raise a family.

In 2017 I lost my dear wife to pancreatic cancer, the second tragedy in a life otherwise blessed in so many ways. Because our sons are grown up, it occurred to me that I was at liberty to return to Britain. But I won’t. I still feel British, and Britain is a wonderful place to visit. But I have grown to love the youthful energy, brashness, and, for the most part, classlessness of America – not to mention its extraordinary natural beauty and under-appreciated cultural diversity.

But I speak only for myself, not for my sons. They are still near the beginnings of their adult lives, and international migration is now easier than ever. Who knows where they will end up? Their father, and his father before him, while not yet out of their twenties, were still a very long way from home. 

I am an academic philosopher by profession. As commonly happens with less wholesome obsessions, I discovered philosophy as a teenager, and St Paul’s played a key role.

The story of my immigration is also very different from that of my father’s. He emigrated and then fell in love (with my mother). For me, it was the other way around.