Soren Kierkegaard

that they knew Kierkegaard existed, despite the fact that Johan Ludvig had
a number of Kierkegaard’s works, includingEither/Or,Repetition, andPre-
faces, on his bookshelf. And if Kierkegaard had counted on Johan Ludvig
dilating upon his paean to Mrs. Gyllembourg, he was going to have to do
a recount, because in Johan Ludvig’s personal papers there is not so much
as a comma concerningA Literary Review. There is a bit more to be gained
from Johanne Luise, who subsequently “reexperienced the entire period in
recollection ”(to lift a phrase from the title of her memoirs), but even here
we are still in bagatelle territory—a few lines on Kierkegaard’s analysis of
her revival of the role of Juliet. And at the places where we might expect
Kierkegaard to appear in her account, he is noticeably absent. In the rather
voluminous chapter onThe Corsair, for example, she recounted quite indig-
nantly that “scandal at the expense of one’s neighbor was the order of the
day. ”And, she continued, “This new fashion of attacking private individu-
als caused quite a stir and gained the journal an enormous circulation. Ev-
eryone who was not the object of its attacks found it enormously amusing
until they themselves were attacked; then they found it outrageous and
scandalous. ”When we remember that Kierkegaard often explained his
“leap intoThe Corsair ”as a protest made in solidarity with the Heibergian
platform, the way in which his efforts (heroic efforts, he believed) were
ignored is almost painful.
We cannot avoid the disheartening conclusion that Kierkegaard’s attempt
to sow discord in the “coteries ”recoiled principally on himself and that
those attacked never felt the least touched by the assault. As a consequence
of this historical situation, we are compelled to speculate a little as to whether
Kierkegaard’s depiction of his infinite sufferings at the hands ofThe Corsair
is a similar sort of construction, something that certainly was full of signifi-
cance for Kierkegaard, but had only minimal connection to reality.