similarly made use of Mrs. Heiberg as an occasion to comment on the follies
of the age, of which there are always many. Kierkegaard was well satisfied
withThe Crisis, however, and he explained that if it were ever to be pub-
lished as a separate volume, “the pseudonym ought to be retained, but the
thing dedicated to Professor Heiberg. ”And the dedication was to be
worded as follows: “Dedicated to Mr. Prof. J. L. Heiberg / Denmark’s
aesthetician / by a subaltern aesthetician, the author.”
The dedication remained only an idea, but when Kierkegaard issuedOn
My Work as an Authorin 1851 he took the occasion to acknowledge offi-
cially his paternity ofThe Crisis, and he sent a copy of the book to Mrs.
Heiberg, accompanied by a letter appointing her as the real reader ofThe
Crisis. Subsequently J. L. Heiberg had the letter published inKjøbenhavnspos-
tenalong with his “Contribution to Knowledge Concerning Kierkegaard’s
Views of the Theater. ”Heiberg concluded by recommending Kierkegaard’s
piece, which he said ought to be read because of, among other reasons, the
“contempt with which he dismisses the incompetent theater criticism of
those times, with all its aesthetic shallowness and moral odiousness.”
These appreciative words from Kierkegaard’s aesthetic educator and rival
would really have warmed his heart, but they missed the boat: By the time
they appeared, Kierkegaard had been dead for a month and a half.
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
Kierkegaard’s contemporaries did not understand him; he was convinced
of this. But perhaps posterity would understand him. Thus in his journal
from 1848 we read, “I can only be understood after my death. ”But the
same year Kierkegaard would also write that “at some point, it would surely
be the right thing to give my times a definite impression, not a reduplicated
one, of what I claim to be, what I want, et cetera.”
This fear of being misunderstood might seem surprising in an author who
had renounced, both pseudonymously and in his own name, any connec-
tion with significant portions of his oeuvre on a number of occasions—but
the fear was there all the same. This was apparently one of the reasons
that, despite all his personal priorities and profound skepticism regarding
the public, Kierkegaard wished to communicate openly. In the early spring
of 1847, for example, he had had the idea of “offering a little course of
twelve lectures on the dialectic of communication. ”These lectures were to
be accompanied by twelve similar lectures on “romantic love, friendship,
and love. ”He started work on this project in mid-May of that year, and it
progressed quite nicely. But then he suddenly realized that he was simply
not “suited to give lectures, ”and he explained this by noting that “I am