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The secret life of Kierkegaard's lover
Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy
Among less loudly noted notable events of September 2001 as the publication in Denmark of a slim volume, not yet translated into English, entitled Regine Olsen's Diary. The diary itself is a mere fifty pages, preceeding it a fourteen-page introduction by Erik Sondergaard Hansen (whose actual existence is in question in the Danish press and academic world) and following it an eight-page afterword by Johs. Norregard Frandsen, a contemporary Danish literary critic whose existence is unquestioned.
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As of this writing, however, no one quite knows whether the Olsen diary is real or forged, cynical hoax, a prankish thumb in the rib of academia, or brilliant fiction. No one, that is, other than perhaps the diary's owner and foreword-writer, Erik Sondergaard Hansen, who asserts it has been in his family's possession for a century, squirreled away between the covers of a book purchased in auction by his grandfather. Not a literary person himself, he claims to have been unaware that its existence was unknown to the academic world until his recent retirement from a consultancy in the United Arab Emirates where it is purported he lives. However, no one quite seems to know yet whether Erik Sondergaard Hansen is a person or a fiction. Some shrewd observers have noted the similarity between his name and that of the critic who wrote the afterword, Johs. Norregaard Frandsen. (This name-play begins to resemble one of the anti-illusionist ploys Paul Auster so adeptly exercises in his novels and film-scripts, leaving the reader in doubt as to whether Paul Auster is his own main character, whether Paul Auster the author is toying with the reader's susceptibilities, whether Paul Auster is making a statement about the inseparability of author and subject, or whether Paul Auster has simply wearied of trying to differentiate between himself and his protagonist, much as the former American Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, reports to have achieved final author-identification liberation by deciding that the "I" in his poems is, indeed, himself, although the Pinsky "I", he goes on to note, is an ever-evolving and elusive entity.)
Nonetheless, some historical facts do exist with regard to Regine Olsen. In 1840-41, she was the eighteen-year-old fiancee of the then twenty-seven-year-old "father of existentialism," Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55). We know that Kierkegaard wrote about Regine (his "Regina") in his journals, and what we know--or thought we knew--about their relationship, we had from the journal entries he recorded nearly ten years after their engagement was broken. We also know or can surmise or have been told that the novel, The Seducer's Diary, which is embedded within Kierkegaard's first published book of philosophy, Either-Or (1842), has a female main character named Cordelia who resembles Regine Olsen, although the novel's anti-hero--despite resemblances to Kierkegaard in his relationship with Regine--is also claimed, inter alia in a biographical novel by Henrik Stangerup, to be based upon the real-life personage of a then contemporary, upcoming Danish literary scholar, Peder Ludvig Moller, who was to figure in a feud with Kierkegaard which was said to have contributed to the destruction of both.
In the course of the feud, Kierkegaard was cruelly caricatured for the unevenness of his physique in an anonymously published periodical of the time, Corsaren, became a laughing stock in Copenhagen, and retreated from public view. Kierkegaard apparently, and debatably by mistake, thought and pronounced Moller to be involved with the clandestine, anti-royalist Corsaren, causing the socially inferior Moller to lose any chance of tenure at the royally supported Copenhagen University. Moller left Denmark never to return and, after nearly twenty years of philandering, died of syphilis in Normandy in 1865, his considerable promise as a writer and literary critic unfulfilled. (Ironically, among his papers is said to be the script of a novella he wrote about a seducer.) The life of Moller is the fictional subject of a 1988 novel by Henrik Stangerup, It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe (published in English as The Seducer in 1990, tr. Sean Martin).
In the introduction to his book, Stangerup claims to have found in the Danish Royal Library a couple of bags of Moller's papers upon which he bases his novel. This calls to mind the assertion of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous editor, Victor Hermit, at the beginning of Either-Or, that the papers collected in the book were discovered in a secondhand writing desk--or for that matter the later assertion that Olsen's diary was found inside a secondhand book.
John Updike wrote an introduction to a 1997 edition of The Seducer's Diary (Princeton University Press, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong). Updike sees Kierkegaard's smokescreen of pseudonymous editor and fictive writing desk as an attempt to appear to portray himself as a scoundrel which in fact is "an attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast." Yet if Moller really were the model for Kierkegaard's Seducer, or half the model, the variations of motive multiply: an act of revenge masking a wound masked as a boast; or, an act of moral exposure masking revenge masking a wound masked as a boast masking self-incrimination aimed to mask the insult to an innocent's pride covering over ... and so on.
