Soren Kierkegaard

as Emil Boesen confidentially informed Martin Hammerich in a letter of
July 20, 1838—Kierkegaard had “written a piece on Andersen which is to
appear in Heiberg’sPerseus; the style is a bit heavy, but it is a good piece of
work in other respects.”
Heiberg agreed, but he nonetheless sent Kierkegaard some critical com-
ments about the article, because if one was going to appear inPerseus,ithad
to be with style.Perseuswas a “journal for the speculative idea,” addressing
itself to those who were able to “express positive and independent ideas”
about art, religion, and philosophy. Among its 133 subscribers the journal
counted H. N. Clausen, Mynster, Oehlenschla ̈ger, Sibbern, and Hans
Christian Ørsted, so it was the absolutely right place to get one’s positive
and independent ideas published. Heiberg’s letter to Kierkegaard has not
survived, but from Kierkegaard’s servile reply to Heiberg, dated July 28,
1838, we may infer that Heiberg had been dissatisfied with the article’s style
and had requested that the young man write a reasonably readable Danish.
Kierkegaard therefore turned to his old schoolmate H. P. Holst and asked
him to do something with the language. Holst relates that during their time
at school there had been a regular traffic between the two of them: Kierke-
gaard wrote Latin compositions for Holst, while Holst wrote Danish com-
positions for Kierkegaard, who expressed himself in a hopelessly Latin Dan-
ish crawling with participial phrases and extraordinarily complicated senten-
ces. Thus Holst was aware of the problem, and indeed he insists that over
the course of the summer he actuallytranslatedKierkegaard’s piece into
Danish. In his final examinations on leaving school Kierkegaard earned top
marks in Danish,laudabilis præ ceteris, so Holst’s account, which was written
in 1869—nearly forty years after their schooldays and thirty years after the
book on Andersen—should be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, no
sooner was the manuscript ready thanPerseusfolded, so Kierkegaard had to
contact Reitzel and underwrite the publication of his “piece on Andersen”
as a little book in itself. The whole enterprise came to fruition on September
7, 1838, and on that date, less than a month after his father’s death, Kierke-
gaard could call himself an author, the author of the workFrom the Papers
of One Still Living, Published against His Will by S. Kjerkegaard. The cryptically
titled work was a seventy-nine-page analysis, simultaneously intensive and
not a little offensive, of Hans Christian Andersen as a novelist, with continu-
ing reference to his third novel,Only a Fiddler, which had been published
on November 22, 1837.
In his autobiography,The Fairy Tale of My Life, published in 1855, Ander-
sen relates that a bit after the publication of hisFiddlerhe had encountered
Kierkegaard, who had apprised him of a forthcoming critique that would
treat the book much more fairly than had previous reviews, “because,” as