Soren Kierkegaard

senior, the hard news that only dead and transfigured personalities have the
right to be productive.
He set forth this requirement in a book entitledFrom the Papers of One Still
Living, a title that has always been puzzling. It has been called mysterious,
unreasonable, strange, affected, artificial, and many other synonyms. It has
been seen as connected to the two deaths that had occurred immediately
prior to the book’s appearance—Poul Martin Møller’s death in March, and
Kierkegaard’s father’s death in August—and also to Kierkegaard’s notion
that he himself would die before his thirty-fourth year. And finally, it has
been speculated that the title reflects Kierkegaard’s critique of Andersen’s
spineless notion of a genius and thus represents a sort of defiant triumph:
Here we have the voice of a genius who wasnotbroken, even though
existence had treated him much more roughly than that sniveler of a sup-
posed genius we see in Andersen.
Most often, however, people have ignored the fact that the title had
originally been attached to the never-completed farceThe Battle between the
Old and the New Soap-Cellars, which in its final version would have borne
the subtitle: “From the Papers of One Still Living, Published against His
Will by S. Kierkegaard.” But this is not merely a case of the literary recycling
of a half-dead title; the recycling was in fact grounded deep within the
book’s theme, namely that the writer has (or has not) died away from the
world. Thus on January 9, 1838, Kierkegaard noted in his journal that he
had hit upon a designation for the special “class of people” who were to be
his future readers. He had come upon the idea in Lucian, the Greek poet
who at one point discusses someparanekroi(fellow dead), which Kierkegaard
translated in the singular as “one who, like me, is dead.” This is how Kier-
kegaard imagined his reader, and although there was a dark, romantic fan-
tasy here, there was also something else. To die is, in fact, todie away,to
die away from this world, from one’s immediacy, in order to be resurrected,
in the world of spirit, to a second immediacy.
From this perspective, the titlecanbe read as Kierkegaard’s indirect decla-
ration that he, too, was unable to say that he has died away; that he, too,
was one still living, who like Andersen did not possess the desired life view.
Thus, to some extent his criticism of Andersen’s autobiographical work has
itself an autobiographical character. The title was not one of defiant triumph
but was more an intimation of a sort of solidarity, a fellowship of the imper-
fect. And toward the end of the book Kierkegaard declares that, as areader,
he evaluates Andersen completely differently than he does as acritic. With
a thoughtful smile Kierkegaard recalls his first impression of the book and
is then filled with a feeling of gratitude toward the author to whom he owes
all this, a feeling that Kierkegaard does not wish to put on paper but which