Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s mood was not improved when he learned—“quite by acci-
dent”—that the same review had been reprinted a couple of days later in
the provincial newspaperFyens Avis, though with the minor alteration “that
the words ‘highly gifted’ are omitted.”
A little more than a month later, on September 16, 1851, there was yet
another article on Kierkegaard inFlyve-Posten, in which a gentleman who
signed himself “4651” more or less cautioned his readers against purchasing
On My Work as an Author. Kierkegaard’s commentary on this: “The only
thing I find noteworthy is... the signature, ‘4651.’ It is impressive, con-
vincing, and overpowering. If the dreadful thing happens, and someone
now comes along who signs himself ‘789,691,’ I would be crushed.”
In late October, Kierkegaard sounded what was to all appearances an
unusually hopeful note: “But now my star is in the ascendant in Denmark.
A special little book has appeared, a sort of review.” It soon becomes clear,
however, that Kierkegaard was being ironic and that he had every reason
to be. For what occasioned his feigned jubilation was the appearance a cou-
ple of weeks earlier of an anoymous piece entitledOn Magister S. Kierke-
gaard’s Work as an Author. Observations of a Village Pastor. The village pastor
was actually Ludvig Gude, who was a close friend of Martensen, which did
not bode well. And Kierkegaard was not exactly delighted. True, Gude
often employed civil enough language, calling Kierkegaard an excellent,
brilliant, noble, and singular author: “Indeed, he practically lavished flat-
tering adjectives upon me as an author.” Despite this, however, Gude gener-
ally took a rather superior and standoffish view of the works, and his ap-
proach was marred by a series of blunders that Kierkegaard commented on
in such detail that his own remarks soon constituted a fifty-page manuscript!
First of all, the village pastor had not read the works systematically at all—
which, incidentally, he himself had admitted as early as page five—so that
the title of his little work was misleading, at the very least.Second of all, the
village pastor had not been able to differentiate between the pseudonymous
works and those in Kierkegaard’s own name and had thereby failed to ap-
preciate the finely honed dialectic that runs through the canon: “It is easy
to see how someone who wanted to have (as it is called) a little fun and
games in the literary world has only to take a hodgepodge of quotations,
some from ‘the Seducer,’ some from Johannes Climacus, some from myself,
et cetera, print them all together as though they were all my words, point
out the contradictions among them, and thus produce a confused and mot-
ley impression, as if the author were some sort of a lunatic. Hurrah!” This
sort of maneuver has also been practiced in more recent times under the
banner bearing the device “deconstruction.”Third of all, the author had the
obsessive notion that Kierkegaard supposedly valued direct communication