however; indeed, Regine actually felt “upset” by Kierkegaard’s journals and
therefore had no desire to acquire the subsequent volumes.
Neither was Goldschmidt exactly delighted when the volume containing
Kierkegaard’s journal entries aboutThe Corsairand its crew was published
in 1872, supplying the public with an extremely one-sided picture of the
old dispute. Goldschmidt quickly came to feel just as scandalized about his
connection withThe Corsairas Kierkegaard had felt in his day, and he thus
felt compelled to undertake a sort of “de-Corsairification” of his character.
This took the form of lengthy exchanges of letters with editor H. P. Barfod
and with the journalist Otto Borchsenius, who had covered the matter in
the late 1870s, publishing a series of well-written but very tendentious arti-
cles that had presented Kierkegaard “as something of a saintly figure with a
halo around his head,” while Goldschmidt had been made into a scoundrel
and a malefactor. “Finally,” as Goldschmidt wrote to Borchsenius in late
March 1878, “I come to the abusive language itself, which you copy down
and reprint repeatedly with a certain literary relish. For you it is afactthat
I have been abused so ‘mightily’ and ‘violently.’ You seem to forget the
fact that I am alive, and that the renewed brutality can inflict injury.” Borch-
senius and his readers were not very worried about that, however, and
Goldschmidt remained the loser; he could point to “facts” until the cows
came home, for all the good it would do him. Against this background of
increasing interest in Kierkegaard, Goldschmidt jotted down some sketchy
and fragmentary impressions of the long-deceased magister, and then sud-
denly he came to write a sort of obituary that is truly impressive in its sober
objectivity, devoid of all hatred: “He belonged to an enormous, shining
world of thought. He carried it within himself. There was a sort of Olympus
in his head—clear, blesse`d gods of thought....Andwhen he stood before
me in that form, I realized that he was the sort of person before whom one
must really give way with hat in hand.”
Peter Christian’s Misery
After all the homage that the funeral had occasioned, Peter Christian re-
turned to Pedersborg, and one would hope that the wool-covered sofa that
had been so generously stuffed with curled horsehair was, in fact, excellent
to sleep on in a pinch, because things came to pinch more and more. On
the night of November 10–11, 1856—“Søren’s death day”—he dreamed
about his younger brother, who had granted that he “was right in a matter
concerning religion.” After that, he dozed off again, and then—“after a
period of being half-awake”—he dreamed that Bishop Mynster had “exam-