Soren Kierkegaard

“B” was apparently still untaken at the time, so Kierkegaard was permit-
ted to use it. Beginning with the very choice of his title, in which “morn-
ing” played upon Lehmann’s use of the word “dawn,” Kierkegaard tele-
graphed the impertinent and light-hearted style that would characterize his
article. Employing roughly equal amounts of dialectical accuracy and ironic
arbitrariness, Kierkegaard touched upon various details in Lehmann’s piece,
blending them into an absurd, rollicking travesty that didn’t care a fig about
objectivity. And reactions to Kierkegaard’s article were not long in coming.
On March 4 Johannes Hage, the youthful editor ofFædrelandet, published
an article “On the Polemic ofFlyveposten,” in which he expressed his irrita-
tion at the belligerent witticisms which in B’s case served scarcely any other
purpose than to “glorify his own little self.” What particularly irritated
Hage, however, was the “shameless attack upon Liunge,” of which the
aforementioned B was guilty. Kierkegaard had asserted that A. P. Liunge,
the editor ofKjøbenhavnsposten, was really “too good to be the editor of
Kjøbenhavnsposten,” a newspaper so terrible that the most reasonable solution
would be to have “a complete zero” in the editor’s chair. Indeed, Kierke-
gaard had no doubt that just as “one sells one’s cadaver to the anatomy
schools in England,” in Denmark it would only be a matter of time before
one could “sell one’s body to be used as editor ofKjøbenhavnsposten.”
This was not polite. It was practically libelous, but it was nonetheless
tactically shrewd because Liunge was one of Heiberg’s pet peeves: He al-
ways called him “the copyist.” So things went well, and the very next day
Kierkegaard received support from an unexpected quarter. The weekly
journalStatsvennen[Danish: “Friend of the State”]—conservative-leaning,
as its name more than intimated—had attributed to Heiberg the article Kier-
kegaard had published under the pseudonym “B”! “Heiberg has written
a number of witty pieces, but scarcely anything better than the article in
Flyveposten,” reportedStatsvennenin rapt admiration. Indeed, if “Rahbek
were still alive and among us, he would call it priceless.” Kierkegaard was
almost giddy with delight. He copiedStatsvennen’s words into his journal,
though not quite word for word, which shows that he must have studied
them with such care that he (almost) knew them by heart! And to make
the triumph complete, Kierkegaard added that Poul Martin Møller, who
was also unaware of the true identity of the author, was just about to run
after Heiberg on the street in order to thank him for the article—“because
it was the best piece that had appeared sinceFlyvepostenhad become politi-
cal”—when at the last second Emil Boesen stopped him and told him who
had actually written it.
Nothing could be more flattering than to be confused with Heiberg,
whose attentions were the object of every new author’s wildest dreams.