Soren Kierkegaard

Andersen explained, Kierkegaard said that “I had been completely misunder-
stood!” Andersen therefore expected a genuine encomium about his book,
but time passed, and in his almanac entry for August 30, 1838, Andersen
whined impatiently: “Experienced mental torture about Kierkegaard’s as yet
unpublished critique.” A bit more than a week later, the long-awaited cri-
tique appeared, and Andersen had a shock: “An atrocious letter from [Chris-
tian] Wulff and immediately thereafter Kierkegaard’s critique. Eduard [Col-
lin] gave me cooling powders. Walked as if in a coma.” Poor Andersen! It
helped a little when kindly B. S. Ingemann, Andersen’s lifelong friend, wrote
consolingly on December 9, 1838: “Kierkegaard’s review has weighed
upon your spirits, I should think. I don’t see that it contains any bitterness
or any desire to injure you, however. He probably intends much better by
you than he has indicated. The conclusion contains hints of a friendly atti-
tude, albeit strangely repressed.” Ingemann did find it “one-sided and un-
reasonable” that Kierkegaard had expressed his “disapproval in printer’s
ink” while simultaneously formulating his “thanks and approval in invisible
ink”—but that was just the way Kierkegaard wrote. And since Ingemann
was acquainted with Andersen’s delicacy of temperament, he added, as a
preventative of further suffering: “By all means you must not allow this
opposition to depress you.”
Naturally, Andersen allowed himself to get depressed anyway, but by
1855 he had collected himself sufficiently to have forgotten his immediate
reaction, and he instead characterized Kierkegaard’s book in a technical and
objective manner as difficult “to read with its heavyHegelianstyle. It was
said in jest that onlyKierkegaardandAndersenhad read the entire book....
At that time, this is what I got out of it: that I was no writer, but a fictitious
character who had slipped out of my category.” And Andersen, who did
not like to be on unfriendly terms with anyone, especially not with someone
who was famous, added graciously: “Later I better understood this author,
who has obliged me along my way with kindness and discernment.”
Practically nothing is known about the relationship between these two
geniuses, Andersen and Kierkegaard, prior to 1838. Both were members of
the Student Association at the university, and they could also have run
into one another at the Music Society. Before writing his debut book on
Andersen, Kierkegaard had been acquainted with Andersen’s littleJourney
on Foot from Holmens Canal to the East Point of Amager, the novelsThe Improvi-
satoreandO. T., the dramaAgnete and the Merman, and a few fairy tales. At
one point in 1837 he noted thatThe Improvisatore, which had come out in
a second printing that year, did not really amount to much—apart from a
single observation: “The Italian takes his leave in the evening by saying
felicissima notte, and Andersen notes that ‘The Scandinavian wishes one