Soren Kierkegaard

take money for his instruction, and with him in mind Kierkegaard described
his royalties a number of times as “rather Socratic.” A passage inPrefacesis
typical of this: “A Danish author must not only possess intellect, expertise,
and the like, which have of course always been regarded as desirable, he
must also have money and, above all, a quite unusual temperament in order
to be able to take satisfaction in giving away his time, his efforts—and his
money—without receiving much else in return except ingratitude.”
This complaint was a frequently recurring theme in his writings, and it
became increasingly associated with satire about the literary situation in
Denmark. As he writes at the beginning ofOn My Work as an Author:
“When a country is small, naturally all things are proportionally small in the
small country. This is also true in literature. Royalties and all related matters
will merely be insignificant....Soifthere is an individual who possesses
the talent to be an author, and he is also fortunate enough to have some
money, then he will become an author pretty much at his own expense.”
Such pronouncements cannot help but give the impression that Kierke-
gaard’s work was an enterprise that was not only nonprofit, but indeed
ended up unprofitable. Quite early on, Emil Boesen and Hans Brøchner
helped give currency to this idea, but it was Henriette Lund and her half-
brother Frederik Troels-Lund, along with their father, Councillor of Justice
Henrik Ferdinand Lund (who was a department head in the National Bank),
who came to function more or less unwittingly as the great mythmakers
with respect to Kierkegaard’s finances. Just five days after Kierkegaard’s
death, Lund, the National Bank man, would write the following to his son:
“If anyone talks about the great fortune that he left behind, just let him talk.
But the truth is this, that while he was alive he disposed of his money in
such a way—in part on his writings, in part on living expenses, and in part
on the poor—that he leaves nothing except his library, etc.”
Thus the idea that Kierkegaard spent a considerable part of his fortune in
publishing his works became a putative fact quite early, and it was reinforced
by a certain ambiguity in Kierkegaard’s journals. During the period immedi-
ately following the attack byThe Corsair, the author who had been the target
of so much ridicule wrote: “It is undeniably an education to be situated in
a little town like Copenhagen as I am. To work to the utmost of my abilities,
almost to the point of despair, with profound agony in my soul and much
inner suffering, to pay out money in order to publish books—and then, to
have literally fewer than ten people who read them through properly.” Dur-
ing this same year and in the same tone, while reflecting upon Goldschmidt
and P. L. Møller in a less-than-friendly fashion, Kierkegaard wrote: “Nowa-
days, royalties, even for well-known authors in the Danish literary world,
are very modest, while the on the other hand, the gratuities that are distrib-