Soren Kierkegaard

he will whisper in Andersen’s ear when the occasion presents itself. In other
words, Ingemann was on the right track when he thought he could discern
in the final portion of Kierkegaard’s piece “a friendly attitude, albeit
strangely repressed.”
Nothing ever came of Kierkegaard’s intention to whisper confidentially
into Andersen’s ear. Andersen, on the other hand, did manage to pay Kier-
kegaard back withA Comedy in the Open Air. A Vaudeville in One Act, Based
on the Old Comedy “An Actor against His Will”. Andersen’s play was per-
formed for the first time at the Royal Theater on May 13, 1840, with
Ludvig Phister in the role of an itinerant theater director who disguises
himself as a farmhand, set designer, prompter, and other amusing roles,
including a philosophical hairdresser—a “hair splitter”—who speaks gib-
berish and declaims, with great emotion, some of the most opaque passages
from Kierkegaard’s book, passages that are not made any clearer by a couple
of typographical errors on Andersen’s part. Kierkegaard did not see the play
performed, but when it was published on October 26, 1840, he bought it
right away and soon thereafter penned the article “Just a Moment, Mr.
Andersen!”—a coarse reprimand in which he first mocked Andersen for
having takenall of two yearsto come “rushing into the literary world with
4 shillings worth of polemics”—and then expressed his great annoyance at
seeing himself caricatured as a “drivelling Hegelian.” It was a good thing—
for both Andersen’s sense of well-being and Kierkegaard’s reputation—that
Kierkegaard left the manuscript of the article lying in his desk drawer; it has
since disappeared without a trace.
After their collision in 1838, Andersen and Kierkegaard appear to have
vanished from each other’s consciousness for long periods of time, but by
1843 when Andersen wrote his world-famous fairy tale “The Ugly Duck-
ling,” the egg had presumably learned its lesson from Kierkegaard and man-
aged to get along splendidly without any warmth from its surroundings.
After all, it is no problem to be hatched by a duck pond—provided one has
emerged from a swan’s egg. And in his first autobiography, dating from
1847, Andersen demoted the main character inOnly a Fiddlerfrom a genius
to a talented person who merely imagined he was a genius. The following
year he sent Kierkegaard a copy of hisNew Fairy Tales, a big two-volume
edition in which he penned this dedication: “Eitheryou like my little works
Oryou don’t like them. They are nonetheless sent without Fear and
Trembling, and that is something, at any rate.”
Andersen’s effect on Kierkegaard was less marked, but in the draft of
“The Seducer’s Diary” Kierkegaard compared the young military officer,
who is the seducer’s rival, to the steadfast tin soldier, because the military
officer, too, would one day “fall into the gutter.” Similarly, in the draft of