Soren Kierkegaard

tion with Miss Olsen (Regina).” The question mark was appropriate be-
cause the break in fact took place the next day, Monday, October 11. After-
ward, the younger brother—who otherwise tended to associate certain
dates with specific rituals—was similarly unable to recall the date, and many
years later he made use of old newspapers and journal entries in an attempt
to reconstruct the sequence of events that had led up to the break.
The broken engagement was soon known in town and people began
talking. It was rumored that one evening Kierkegaard had invited Regine
to the theater to seeDon Giovanni, but that as soon as the orchestra had
finished playin gthe overture, Kierke gaard had stood up and said: “Now
we are leaving. You have had the best, the expectation of pleasure!” Many
years later, when Julius Clausen gingerly reported this tale to Regine, she
said: “Yes, I remember that evenin gwell; but it was after the first act, and
we left because he had a bad headache.” Henrik Hertz joined the chorus
of the scandalized and told the followin gstory about “the youn g, lovely
Miss Olsen,” whom Kierkegaard “practically tortured to death with his
peculiarities”: “One day he fetched her in a landau for a ride in the country,
about which she was indescribably happy. But at the circle in Vesterbro he
turned around and drove her home again, so that she could become accus-
tomed to denyin gherself pleasures. He should have been beaten on his
a—— for that.”
Of course the Olsen family was also greatly dismayed. Regine’s brother,
Jonas Christian, who received his theological degree in 1842, wrote a letter
(now lost) in which he declared his flamin ghatred for Kierke gaard, who,
with fabulous arrogance, remarked in his journal: “If my good Jonas Olsen
were really capable, as he wrote in his memorable note, of hatin gas no one
has ever hated before, I should count myself fortunate to be his contempo-
rary, fortunate to be the object of such hatred.” Regine’s sister Cornelia
reacted in much finer fashion, puttin ginto words what many other people
have surely come to sense in later years: “I do not understand Magister
Kierkegaard, but I nonetheless believe that he is a good person!” The under-
standing—was it perhaps a genuine attraction?—between the two was ap-
parently mutual, because in 1844 Kierkegaard noted: “Under the category
of private studies, and to be kept as delicate as possible, I would like to
depict a female figure who was great by virtue of her lovably modest and
bashful resignation (for example, a somewhat idealized Cornelia Olsen, the
most excellent female figure I have known and the only one who has com-
pelled my admiration). She would have the experience of seein gher sister
marry the person whom she herself loved.”
Kierkegaard never depicted such a figure—a lovably modest and bashful
woman—but in “The Seducer’s Diary,” with the change of but one conso-