The secret life of Kierkegaard's lover

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Most interesting I think is the novel whose anti-hero is said to be based on the above-mentioned Moller, The Seducer's Diary. However, it is in some ways difficult not to relate the innocent fictional Cordelia Wahl of Kierkegaard's novel with the spurned real-life Regine Olsen. Unlike Lear's third daughter, the Cordelia of Kierkegaard does carry her heart as a kiss on her full, pretty lips. Johs, the eponymous seducer, with cynical strategy plans and enacts the seduction of the young woman. Having achieved his conquest, he concludes, "Why cannot such a night be longer? ... still, it is over now, and I hope never to see her again. When a girl has given away everything, then she is weak, then she has lost everything.... Now all resistance is impossible, and only as long as that is present is it beautiful to love.... I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost the fragrance ... I will have no farewell with her; nothing is more disgusting to me than a woman's tears and a woman's prayers, which alter everything and yet really mean nothing. I have loved her, but from now on she can no longer engross my soul."

Then, this Johs concludes, with a speculation that cannot help but recall a claim in K's own journal, if "one would make (a girl) so proud that she would imagine that it was she who tired of the relationship ... (it) ... might have psychological interest, and along with that enrich one with many erotic observations." (Quotes are from the translation by David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson, and Walter Lowrie.) The aim of the suggestion reported in K's journal, however, is claimed to "give the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement so that she might be spared all offense."

Here is where we find the point of essential difference between K's journal, K's fictional seducer's diary, and the newly published diary of Regine Olsen. In her diary, Olsen tires of K's melancholy and difficult manner, his walking out on plays that bore him, his last-moment refusal to attend a ball she has been longing for. She reports sending him away, telling him not to come back. Pale and weeping, Kierkegaard makes her promise to say that it was he who broke with her. She remarks that no one would believe that, but agrees and writes that she will keep her word.

In fact, however, years later, when K and the man Olsen later married were both dead, Regine Olsen is reported to have given an interview in which she revealed that she had initiated the break, not K. The newly published diary supports this. Kierkegaard scholars in Denmark (perhaps offended that the diary was not shown to them before publication so that it could be submitted to the scientific scrutiny of what one journalist has called their "big bad electron microscope") respond by claiming that Regine was only fulfilling the proposal of K that he take the blame and leave her honor intact. After all, upon K's death she was given the opportunity to edit the portion of his journals dealing with their relationship and voiced no disagreement at the time, in 1855, when she was thirty-three and living in the Danish West Indies with her husband, who was Governor. Not until forty-one years later, when the husband died, is she said to have changed her story--a strange chronology.