for the dissolution of parliament, for the separation of church and state, for
pensioning off the clergy, and (here he was truly ahead of his time) for heavy
taxation of alcohol and tobacco as a means of improving public morals. At
the death of Archdeacon Paulli in 1865, Sommer, displaying the zeal of a
plagiarist, attempted to repeat Kierkegaard’s actions with respect to Myn-
ster. But since Sommer had had no personal bone to pick with the deceased,
he instead attacked Martensen’s speech in Paulli’s memory, urging his fol-
lowers to read it if they needed an “emetic.”
Employing book dealer Lynge as his agent at the auction of Kierkegaard’s
personal effects, Sommer had managed to acquire a walking stick that had
belonged to the deceased. It served him as a sort of pilgrim’s staff in his
restless missionary wanderings through Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Ger-
many, and all the way to America, where he supported himself by drawing
portraits. According to his account, he sold sixty-six drawings of Kierke-
gaard, who was thus introduced to the New World by a psychopath. The
only times Sommer rested were during his frequent stays in jail, which gave
him the peace and leisure he needed in order to write his books and pam-
phlets. When he calculated how many “tens of thousands of miles” he had
traveled—nothing fewer than nine times around the world—in the service
of Søren Kierkegaard, he depicted himself as a modern Apostle Paul. But
neither Sommer nor his son, Mogens Abraham Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Sommer, who followed in his father’s footsteps, managed to accomplish
their objectives, and today both have been consigned to a well-deserved
oblivion. Sommer himself died in 1901, a bitter, impoverished, and burnt-
out man.
Sommer’s mission was one of the first examples (and is the thus far the
best one) that make it clear that Kierkegaard’s campaign cannot be repeated
without ending in embarrassing plagiarism. This was yet another respect in
which Kierkegaardwas, in fact, “the man ofThe Moment.”
The Papers No One Wanted
Several weeks after the funeral, Henrik Lund had gone up to have a look
at his uncle’s papers. The young physician felt called to publish these literary
remains, and he used the ensuing months to acquaint himself with the cases
and boxes and sacks and chests of drawers, in which rolled-up manuscripts
and portfolios and notebooks and letters and bills and loose strips and scraps
of paper lay, awaiting the future. The laborious business of cataloging the
materials had a tempering effect on the immediacy of Lund’s passion, and
on November 27, 1856, he informed Peter Christian that he now found it