Encounters with Kierkegaard
Marino, Gordon
ONE INTENSE LITTLE GUY Encounters with Kierkegaard A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries Collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia...
...Almost immediately, Kierkegaard realized he had made a mistake...
...Kierkegaard's Journals suggest that his decision was overdeter-mined by both motives and perhaps others as well...
...there, both Schlegel and I will happily be there with you...
...For some forty years, she steadfastly refused to respond to such inquiries...
...The most touching pages in this book come from an interview with Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard's ex-fiancee...
...Though the legacy of Kierkegaard's thought is currently being hotly contested, I would argue that many, if not all, of his writings are in one way or another addressed to the questions, What does it mean to have faith in God...
...The impressions that comprise this supremely well-organized book come from people who saw Kierkegaard from every conceivable angle...
...No matter, Kierkegaard was forever wedded to her...
...ONE INTENSE LITTLE GUY Encounters with Kierkegaard A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries Collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen Princeton University Press, $35,358 pp...
...Superbly annotated and a sheer delight to read, Encounters is one of the most important books on Kierkegaard to come out in years...
...It was as though he lived in a spirit world, and with a strange impropriety and eccentricity he could evoke the most frightful things with an explicitness that was terrifying...
...However, after her husband died in 1896, the now-septuagenarian Regine saw it as her responsibility to share her impressions of the man who faithfully vowed to take her into history...
...That recondite interest aside, many of the entries in this book are simply highly entertaining...
...Though by no means hostile to Kierkegaard, Schlegel had no desire for an intellectual menage a trois with Soren Kierkegaard...
...Kierkegaard argued that the individual who does not live in his ideas does not understand them...
...After Kierkegaard's death, Fru Schlegel was frequently asked what it was like to have been Seren Kierkegaard's fiancee...
...There are two explanations offered for Kierkegaard's decision to break off the engagement, a decision which hardly enhanced his reputation in Copenhagen society...
...For anyone blessed with nagging concerns about such matters, I heartily recommend Kierkegaard as a conversation partner...
...In 1849 Kierkegaard wrote to Regine's husband to inquire as to whether or not he would object to Kierkegaard pursuing a Platonic relationship with her...
...The result is a compilation of all known contemporary biographical accounts of Kierkegaard...
...From 1841 until his death in 1855, Kierkegaard composed an almost preternat-urally large ceuvre of lyrical work on matters of life and death...
...According to the other, Kierkegaard felt that he could not obey his calling as a religious author and be a husband at the same time...
...Thus he lived for eight days with the sole purpose of thinking and feeling like a miser....Once he confessed that he had an enormous desire to carry out an actual theft, and then to live with his bad conscience and in fear of disco very....His imagination was so lively that it was as if he saw images right before his eyes...
...Kierkegaard was a polemicist...
...These reminiscences were compiled and published as Erindringer Om S0ren Kierkegaard (Recollections of Soren Kierkegaard...
...A few years after the break, Regine married Fritz Schlegel...
...Bruce Kirmmse, author of the highly acclaimed Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Indiana, 1990), has incorporated all of the material from Johansen's book into his own Encounters with Kierkegaard...
...Fearful that his daughter would literally die of heartbreak, Regine's father, whom Kierkegaard held in high esteem, came to Kierkegaard and pleaded with him to relent...
...In Either/or, in order to make the break with Regine, he developed an elaborate plan to enable Regine to separate from him...
...Not fooling anyone, Kierkegaard gradually took on the persona of a Lothario...
...Kirmmse has collected Regine's thoughts on what must be reckoned one of the great loves of literary history...
...Amazingly enough, however, Kirmmse has also unearthed a cornucopia of previously unpublished material...
...Kirmmse's collection contains illuminating reflections from Kierkegaard's antagonists, most of whom expressed a remarkable degree of ambivalence toward their late nemesis...
...For Kierkegaard, consistently failing to practice what you preach amounts to failing to understand what you are preaching...
...For scholars, Encounters will prove a rich resource for contextualizing Kierkegaard's thought...
...Thus, in the years immediately following Kierkegaard's death, Steen Johansen had the good sense to collect verbal snapshots and impressions from anyone and everyone who knew Kierkegaard personally...
...Gordon Narino Though he would have considered such a description a category mistake, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was a spiritual Mozart of sorts...
...When Kierkegaard was twenty-four, he fell in love with the fourteen-year-old Regine...
...In this sense, Kierkegaard himself invites us to ask about Kierkegaard the person...
...According to one explanation, he did not want to bring Regine into a family as rife with melancholia as his own...
...But Kierkegaard was as intent upon sacrificing Regine as Abraham was on sacrificing Isaac...
...He was neither widely read nor widely appreciated by his countrymen, and yet toward the end of his life the Danes knew that Kierkegaard had achieved at least one form of immortality...
...There are, for instance, recollections from Kierkegaard's elementary school classmates, his professors, people who in their childhood remembered accompanying their father on a walk with Kierkegaard...
...Levin, who copied thousands of Kierkegaard's pages, remembers: On the whole, he lived in fantasies and empty reflections in which he seized upon each thing, transformed it in every possible way, looked at it from all sides, and then reflected on it...
...In the course of his short life, he publicly attacked both the liberal press and the Danish State Church...
...Over the years Kierkegaard continued to send Regine his books, a number of which were replete with not-so-oblique references to her and their relationship...
...In 1841 Regine returned her ring...
...There are accounts from Kierkegaard's typesetters, diary entries from important Danish intellectuals such as George Brandes, short tracts from his brother and adversary, Bishop Peter Kierkegaard...
...What does it mean to follow Christ...
...Bruce Kirmmse's remarkable book, which he accurately describes as a "do-it-yourself biography," sheds some light on a writer who was-if anyone ever was-being spoken through...
...Take for one instance the recollections of Kierkegaard's secretary, Israel Levin...
...About a year later, they became engaged...
...Four decades after Kierkegaard's death, she fondly recalls a letter from Kierkegaard in which he wrote, "You see, Regine, in eternity there is no marriage...
...Regine's memoirs resonate with tenderness...
...Kierkegaard's battles with the powers-that-be made him a universally recognized and frequently derided figure in the streets of Copenhagen...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 1
