Soren Kierkegaard

tion on the spines of the volumes bound in shirting was limited to the title
and several horizontal gold lines .It was a restrained sort of elegance.
Kierkegaard’s collection of books was dominated by contemporary
works, with only fifty or so volumes from before 1750 and a bit more than
a hundred from the period 1750–1800 .Close to half the collection consisted
of theological and devotional literature .In addition to this, the collection
contained the principal works of classical literature, either in Greek or Latin
or in translation, usually German .Most of the major European authors were
also available in German translation, ranging from Dante’sDivine Comedy
and Petrarch’sItalian Poetryto Shakespeare’sDramatic Works, Pascal’sPen-
se ́es, and Byron’sCollected Works .Hegel, Goethe, and German romantics
such as Schlegel, Jean Paul, Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, and Heine were
generously represented .The selection of modern literature was quite varied,
though Danish authors were reasonably well represented, while Swedish
literature was represented by Bellman, period .In addition to a varied collec-
tion of bibliographical and other reference works, Kierkegaard’s library
contained a great many volumes of folk tales, legends, and songs from differ-
ent countries, naturally including such classics as theThousand and One
Nightsand the Grimm brothers’IrishFairyTales, but also Svend Grundtvig’s
Three Hundred Selected and Jolly New Stories, or Jokes and Seriousness: Very
Useful and Good Pastimes, plus the anonymously authored puzzle and joke
book entitled,StrangeQuestions,FuntoListentoandRead,PlusOneofAesop’s
FablesandtheCityandCountryMouse .“When I am tired of everything and
‘full of days,’ ” we read in Kierkegaard’s journal for December 26, 1837,
“fairy tales are always a rejuvenating bath that proves beneficial to me.There
all earthly, all finite cares vanish, and joy—indeed even sorrow itself—is
infinite.”
In any attempt to isolate and identify the material conditions for the gene-
sis of his genius, charting Kierkegaard’s reading during the greedy years of
his youth is an obvious point of departure, but the attempt is beset with at
least two considerable difficulties .For one thing, as is well known, he read
considerably more books than he had in his library, and not only as a young
man, but throughout his entire life, he regularly visited the Athenæum
Reading Society as well as the libraries of the Student Association and the
University of Copenhagen .And he was no less notorious for having got rid
of books over the years, either because he no longer had need of them or
because they might have been burdensome to the proper sort of posthu-
mous reputation he strove more and more systematically to guarantee him-
self .If we compare the auction catalog of his library with the surviving bills
from booksellers, we soon learn that the catalog reflects a reduced collec-
tion: From the year 1836 alone, of the forty-two titles that appear on the