He has surely noticed that his star is in decline at the university. It will
certainly be droll for Rasmus Nielsen and those who are truly of the
younger generation to read that I am a ladies’ author.”
Kierkegaard simply could not wrench himself free of his annoyance at
this, and later that same year, after having complained of the sacrifices he
had had to make for the sake of his literary productivity, he wrote: “In
Fredrika it is stated that I am so sickly and so irritable that I can become
embittered when the sun does not shine as I wish it to.—Goody-goody old
maid, frivolous tramp, you’ve hit it just right! This explanation will unite
different circles that perhaps are not that different from one another. On
the one side, Martensen, Paulli, Heiberg, et cetera, on the other side,
Goldschmidt, P. L. Møller....Allofthem together: It would be a fine
world, except that Mag. Kierkegaard is so sickly and irritable that he can
become embittered if the sun does not shine as he wishes it to.”
Bremer’s sun, at any rate, did not. And indeed, this by itself was enough
to embitter a person.
Kierkegaard’s Dream
In addition to all the opposition in the outer world, Kierkegaard suffered
the special self-torment associated with the unpublished manuscripts—as
time went on, quite a considerable number of them—that had been accu-
mulating and piling up in his study. At length he decided thatThe Point of
View for My Work as an Authorwas to be shelved, whileThe Sickness unto
Deathcould certainly be published. This was the sort of “decision I had so
desperately needed to make; it had been so frightfully fatiguing to have
those manuscripts lying there, and every blessed day to think about publish-
ing them, correcting a word here, then a word there.”
No sooner had Kierkegaard come to an agreement with Bianco Luno,
the printer—who, to Kierkegaard’s surprise, asked to have the manuscript
the very next day—when he learned that Regine’s father, Councillor of
State Terkild Olsen, had died on the night of June 25–26, 1849: “It made
a strong impression on me; had I known of it before I wrote to the printer,
it would have been cause for a postponement.”
It had been slightly less than a year since Kierkegaard had last seen the
councillor. Toward the end of August 1848, thoughts of Regine had re-
turned with irrepressible urgency, and Kierkegaard had “again brought up
her situation,” but at the same time he reminded himself that he could do
nothing for her, however much he might want to: “She will go absolutely
wild if she finds out how things actually were.” Shortly thereafter, on Satur-