Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen
336
Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen
336Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Kierkegaard’s Muse—the first biography of Regine Olsen (1822–1904), the inspiration and one-time fiancée of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—is a moving portrait of a long romantic fever that had momentous literary consequences. Drawing on Regine’s newly discovered letters, acclaimed Kierkegaard biographer Joakim Garff tells the story of her mysterious relationship with Kierkegaard more fully and vividly than ever before, shedding new light on her influence on his life and writings. Like Dante’s Beatrice, Regine is one of the great muses of literary history. Kierkegaard proposed to her in 1840, but broke off the engagement a year later. After their break, they saw each other strikingly often, inside dimly lit Copenhagen churches, on the streets, and on the paths along the old city ramparts, passing by without uttering a word. Psychologically acute and as gripping as a novel, Kierkegaard's Muse is an unforgettable account of a wild, strange, and poignant romance that made an indelible mark on literary history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691191805 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Kierkegaard's Muse
The Mystery of Regine Olsen
By Joakim Garff, Alastair Hannay
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Joakim Garff and Gags ForlagAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17176-0
CHAPTER 1
1855
THE PAINFUL DEPARTURE
In a letter of the 10th of July 1855, Regine summarizes her journey to St. Croix:
You have read between the lines how sad my journey was, for what depressed me most was the complete spiritual apathy, not to say death, that ruled in my heart, yes such glorious things, but I had lost all susceptibility, it was as if on the way to my grave I could already no longer see the light of day.
The letter's recipient was Cornelia, Regine's favorite sister and confidante, who clearly was able to read between the lines. For that is where the most important things are written, in a kind of invisible ink. Regine therefore feels no need to supply the details, but one understands that the long journey to the tropical destination has been taxing, not least psychologically, an experience to be described with metaphors from the silent realm of the dead.
Such an indirect form of communication was called for all the more in the present case, since Regine was not addressing herself to Cornelia alone. It was quite normal at the time for letters to be circulated between members of the family, then to friends and acquaintances wanting to keep abreast of the letter writer's latest news. Cornelia was not necessarily, in other words, the letter's only reader; nor indeed the first, for when Regine had written a letter it sometimes happened that Fritz wanted to add his personal greeting and, if in the mood, he could therefore acquaint himself with the letter's contents — it needed only a quick glance. To talk of censorship would be an exaggeration, but it goes without saying that the knowledge that Fritz might read her letters inevitably set limits to confidentiality and discouraged Regine from wholly opening her heart. Fritz might likewise read one of Cornelia's letters aloud for Regine, a practice that also discouraged the more intimate confidences. It was as if the fourth wall that might guarantee a private space within her letters always adjoined a public reading room, or as if it just wasn't there. And then there was the uncertainty about the letter's further fate, for the result could prove disastrous were it to fall into the wrong hands.
How Regine managed to come away from Copenhagen on that ice-cold Saturday in March 1855, we don't in fact know. But from the letter that she began a day later in Korsør, it seems that she and her fellow travellers covered the first part of the journey by train to Roskilde.
The further stretch of railway from Roskilde to Korsør was not inaugurated until the 26th of April 1856, so prior to that date anyone going further west had to continue by stagecoach — or "diligence" as the vehicle was called after the French prototype. With its broad, yellow body, its looking-glass window panes and imposing lamps, the diligence was both exclusive and commanding in its outward appearance; but the inside was cramped and free movement extremely limited, not least if one had not reserved an upholstered seat with leather armrests in one of the better sections. The foremost seats on the right side in the driving direction were reckoned the most attractive, but opinions on this were divided and therefore much discussed, as we can gather from the amusing judgment that Kierkegaard presents in the pen of one of his pseudonymous authors, Constantin Constantius, in Repetition (1843):
There is a difference of opinion among the learned as to which seat in a stagecoach is the most comfortable. My Ansicht [Ger. viewpoint] is the following: they are all equally terrible. The previous time, I had one of the outer seats toward the front of the vehicle (this is considered by many to be a great coup) and was for thirty-six hours, together with those near me, so violently tossed about that when I came to Hamburg not only had I nearly lost my mind, but also my legs. The six of us who sat in this vehicle were worked together for these thirty-six hours so that we became one body, in such a way that I got the impression of what happened to the Molbos [inhabitants of the peninsula of Mols on Jutland, the butt of many Danish jokes] who, after having sat together for a long time, could no longer recognize which legs were their own.
Nor was Hans Christian Andersen, who spent ten of his seventy years traveling outside Denmark's borders, any great lover of the stagecoaches, which he called "torture chambers" and described as "large, heavy omnibuses with an entrance only on one side, so when it overturned on that side one couldn't escape, and one always overturned."
However, much more personal reasons were to blame for the nature of Regine's journey over Zealand, which she later summarized in the sentence: "my heart was near breaking-point." It had been sad as well as disturbingly final to take leave of her seventy-seven-year-old mother Regine Frederikke, now six years a widow, infirm, and not altogether herself after the loss of her husband Terkild, who had been chief of the Main- and Pass-Book Office under the Department of Finance, and for whom Kierkegaard harbored strong feelings of respect.
And it had been difficult saying goodbye to Maria, the eldest of Regine's sisters, now forty-five and still a spinster. She had for several years been housekeeper for the Soldenfeldt brothers, Ferdinand Vilhelm and Joseph Carl, who had lived together for most of their lives and also belonged to Regine's circle of acquaintances. Maria had a small house just to the north in Tårbæk, where the family and friends often met in the summer; Regine loved it, and would miss it terribly in her exile.
Worst of all, indeed just about impossible, had been taking leave of Cornelia, Regine's closest not only in age but also in temperament. She was thirty-seven, five years older than Regine, and had been married to Emil Winning since the 6th of November 1849, when they had joined hands in the Garrison Church and promised to live together in good times and bad, for better or for worse — and since then had been splendidly occupied with multiplying. By the close of 1852, Laura, Frederikke Mathilde, and Olivia had come into the world, followed, after a brief pause in production, by Paul Thorkild, who sadly proved to be of a more delicate nature and died at five days old. The best remedy for such sorrow is love, as Emil knew, for when Cornelia now kissed Regine farewell she was once more pregnant, again with a daughter, Johanne Marie, who saw the light of day on the 25th of September 1855.
Cornelia was one of those rare and radiant female figures, animated, with great presence of mind, endowed with a noble heart, graced with sensitivity, and accordingly quite simply lovable, amabile. At the time when everyone condemned Kierkegaard's break with Regine, she had said what several others no doubt thought in their hearts: "I do not understand Magister Kierkegaard, but I nonetheless believe that he is a good person!" It is said that when this reached Kierkegaard's ear, he was "touched, indeed impressed." That both the respect and the sympathy were reciprocated on Kierkegaard's part is evident from an 1844 entry in his journal, where he cites Cornelia as the living model of a female figure that he anticipates one day portraying:
Under the title "Private Studies," and to be kept as delicate as possible, I would like to depict a female character who was great by virtue of her lovably modest and bashful resignation (e.g., a somewhat idealized Cornelia Olsen, the most excellent female character I have known and the only one who has compelled my admiration).
As it happens, Kierkegaard never got around to depicting a character so delightfully modest and bashful; but with just a single change of consonant Cornelia turns up in "The Seducer's Diary" as Cordelia, one of the most intense, sensuous and seductive female characters not only in Kierkegaard's portrait gallery, but perhaps in Denmark's Golden Age literature altogether. The fact that literature's Cordelia might have seized an opportunity to roam further as reality's Cornelia can be amusingly substantiated in one of Kierkegaard's entries from January 1851. There, describing his regular meetings with Regine on the ramparts, he commits in this connection a divine slip of the pen: "She comes then either accompanied by Cordelia or alone, and then she always goes back the same way, alone; consequently, she encounters me both times. ... This is certainly not entirely accidental." Hardly, but scarcely less accidental is the psychologically significant slip of the pen: presumably Cornelia and Cordelia were equally delightful.
Cornelia lived with Emil and their three girls at 28 Vestergade, which runs past Gammeltorv, where the Schlegel family lived at number five, in a small, classic apartment building which had been ready for occupation in 1801. The landlord at that time had been a master tailor, Johan Jacob Schlegel, whose son, Wilhelm August, lived on the first floor of the property, which he later took over and administered until his death in 1871. Wilhelm August, who rose to the title of Chamber Councillor, was married to Dorothea Maria, a woman of similar age, who in 1815 gave birth to a girl, Emma, and in 1817 to a boy, Johan Frederik (Fritz), who in turn was followed in 1818 by Clara and she, in 1830, by the late-born Augusta.
Little is known of Fritz's childhood and youth. After matriculating as a student in 1833 at the Metropolitan School, which lies on the corner by Frue Plads, he began to study law and graduated in 1838. It was during these years that he acted as tutor in the Olsen home and developed warm feelings for the family's youngest daughter. She then suddenly took it into her head to become engaged to Kierkegaard, which landed Fritz in a state of combined astonishment and embarrassment.
"YOU MY HEART'S SOVEREIGN MISTRESS"
Some twenty lines into his notebook, Kierkegaard tells how it all began:
On Septbr 8 I left home with the firm intention of deciding the whole matter. We met on the street just outside their house. She said that there was no one at home. I was foolhardy enough to understand these words as just the invitation I needed. I went in with her. There we stood, the two us, alone, in the parlor. She was a little uneasy. I asked her to play a little for me [on the piano] as she usu. did. She did so, but it didn't help me. Then I suddenly took the music book, closed it, not without a certain vehemence, threw it off the piano and said: Oh, what do I care about music? It's you I am searching for, you I've been seeking for two years. She remained silent.
Miss Olsen remained silent — yes, "essentially silent" as he goes on to say — as one might easily understand, and Kierkegaard himself has nothing more to tell her. After throwing away the music book with the aforementioned vehemence, he hastily leaves the apartment and, "frightfully anxious," goes to call on Regine's father, Minister of State Olsen, who is evidently just as dumbfounded as his daughter over all this commotion. Kierkegaard presents his case to him. That leads to further silence: "The father said neither Yes nor No, but was nonetheless quite willing, as I readily understood. I asked if we could speak together; I was granted this for Saturday the 10th of Septemb. afternoon. I said not one single word to charm her — she said, yes."
The scene in the apartment that Tuesday afternoon by the piano in itself shows how little the two really knew each other. And even though ritual in connection with an engagement differed a great deal then from what is customary today, the tremulous anxiety with which Kierkegaard broke in on the minister was absolutely in a class of its own.
Kierkegaard had presumably first met the girl who was now his fiancée in May 1837, at Frederiksberg where he was visiting his theologian friend Peter Rørdam, who lived with his mother Cathrine Georgia. She was the widow of Dean Thomas Schatt Rørdam and, in addition to the son, had three pretty daughters of marriageable age, Elisabeth, Emma, and Bolette. So it wasn't at all a bad place for a young man to include in his itinerary. On that day in May, Elisabeth, Emma, and Bolette had in addition a visit from their fifteen-year-old friend Regine, who later recalled how this Kierkegaard had presented himself without warning and made a "very strong impression" on her. He "spoke unceasingly," indeed his speech "practically poured forth and was extremely captivating." The visit to the Rørdams also left its impression on Kierkegaard, who confides to his journal:
Today too (8 May) I was trying to forget myself, though not with any noisy to-do — that substitute doesn't help, but by going out to Rørdam's to talk with Bolette, and by trying (if possible) to make that devil-wit stay at home, that angel who with blazing sword, as I deserve, interposes himself between me and every innocent girlish heart — when you caught up with me, O God, I thank you for not letting me instantly lose my mind — never have I been more afraid of that; so be thanked for once more bending your ear to me.
The mood is tense and the tone dramatic, but it is not quite clear what really happened. Later Kierkegaard crossed out the words "Rørdam's to talk with Bolette," a fact that the editor, H. P. Barfod, omitted to mention in his 1869 edition. So that when Regine later read the entry, she assumed that it referred to the occasion on which Kierkegaard had been first captivated by her. In this she was evidently mistaken. The aim of Kierkegaard's journey on foot to Frederiksberg that day was to see twenty-two-year-old Bolette, "a very beautiful and sensible girl" — or so her brother Peter called her in a letter of 23rd February 1836. Age-wise, Bolette would have been a far more suitable match than Regine, who had only just had her confirmation. Kierkegaard much later acknowledged that he and Bolette had made in fact an "impression" on each other, and that he therefore felt a certain "responsibility" toward her — "even if in all innocence and purely intellectually." It appears from an entry dated May 1837 that his fascination for the Frederiksberg young lady, and the conflicts bound up with this, proved quite persistent:
Today, again, the same performance — Still, I managed to get out to R[ørdams] — my God, why should this tendency awaken just now — O, how alone I feel! — O, damn that arrogance of being content to stand on my own — everyone will now despise me — O, but you, my God, do not let go of me — let me live and make myself better —
Nor was this entry one that Kierkegaard wanted to come to the knowledge of posterity, and he therefore later tried to make it illegible with repeated crossings out. The next time the name Rørdam appears in the journal is Sunday the 9th of July 1837, when on the way back to town he stopped off in the Frederiksberg Gardens and noted with an almost prophetic self-understanding:
I stand like a solitary spruce, egoistically self-enclosed and pointing toward what is higher, casting no shadow, and only the wood dove builds its nest in my branches. ... Sunday (9 July 37) in Frederiksberg Gardens after calling at the Rørdam place.
With the passing of old hosier Kierkegaard on August the 8th 1838, the son, Søren, not only becomes a wealthy man, he also feels duty-bound to complete his theological studies. He appeals in his journal to the image of the Guadalquivir river, whose name no doubt only natives can pronounce but with which he loves to compare himself: "I shall now for a season, for some miles in time, plunge underground like the Guadalquivir, — to be sure, I shall come up again!" Kierkegaard vanishes from the earth's surface and with an almost supernatural energy assimilates the theological curriculum. The isolation is near to driving him mad, but that he manages to come through it is due to a young girl's having become entwined in his thoughts. From February the 2nd 1839 we have the celebration, translated now into numberless languages, of the woman so prosaically surnamed Olsen, but whose first name was by contrast thankfully so poetic.
You, Sovereign mistress of my heart [Regina], hidden in the deepest privacy of my breast, in my most brimming thoughts on life, there, where it is just as far to heaven as to hell — unknown divinity! Oh, can I really believe the poets' tales that when one sees the beloved for the first time one believes one has seen her long before; that all love, like all knowledge, is recollection; that love too has its prophecies, its types, its myths, its Old Testament in the single individual. Everywhere, in every girl's face, I see a trace of your beauty, but it seems to me that I would have to have all girls in order to extract your beauty from all of theirs; that I'd have to circumnavigate the earth to find that continent which I lack, and that the deepest secrecy of my entire 'I' nevertheless points to it as its pole; — and in the next moment you are so near to me, so present, so powerfully making my spirit whole, that I am transfigured in my own eyes and feel that here is a good place to be. ... You blind god of love! You who see in secret, will you tell me openly? Shall I find what I am seeking here in this world, shall I experience the conclusion of all my life's eccentric premises, shall I enclose you in my arms — or
Does the order say: onward?
Have you gone ahead, you my longing; do you summon me, transfigured, from another world? Oh, I would cast everything aside to become light enough to follow you.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kierkegaard's Muse by Joakim Garff, Alastair Hannay. Copyright © 2013 Joakim Garff and Gags Forlag. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Translator’s Acknowledgment ix
Preface xi
Tuning In 1
Part 1
1855
The Painful Departure 13
“You my heart’s sovereign mistress” 16
The Virgin Islands 24
Governor J. F. Schlegel and His Wife 29
The Attack on the Church 34
“The flies are to such a degree impertinent out here” 37
Patient No. 2067 41
1856
His Last Will and Testament 51
“My Regine! . . . Your K.” 55
“She nodded twice. I shook my head.” 70
Repetition and the Repetition 71
Regine Frederikke Olsen’s Death 80
Cane Garden’s Blessings 82
“Food for worms and that’s the end of it” 88
“. . . for you know how little fuss there is with Fritz and me” 91
Henrik Lund and “Uncle Søren” 95
Regine’s First Letter to Henrik Lund 102
The Sealed Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel 107
The Secret Place in Regine’s Heart 114
The Plague’s Paradise 118
The First Love 126
“. . . it’s exactly a matter I’d like to take up a little: blind love!” 128
“But I am constantly afraid of her passion” 130
“. . . so she eggs the merman on” 132
“. . . an unsettled point between us”—Regine’s Second Letter to Henrik Lund 135
“One unnamed whose name will sometime be named” 138
“Then I return to you . . .” 143
1857
“The Seducer’s Diary” 146
Tropical Yuletide 153
The White Gold—A
Dark Chapter 154
“We have had a Negro-uprising on St. Croix!” 158
Regine and “the Blacks” 163
Birch and His Brother 168
“Meet her without being observed” 172
“. . . I am an exceptional lover” 176
Either/Or 178
“The priest people in Hellevad” 181
“The day is bad, but the night is worse” 183
“. . . then I stand there so untouched by it all” 186
1001 Nights 188
1858
“You imagined it was Cornelia” 194
“What does this silence mean?” 195
“. . . I shall the second time with God’s help become more cruel” 201
“. . . my besetting sin, making eternities!” 204
“God preserve me from their Christianity” 208
“. . . as though I were 16 again and not 36” 212
“What an enormous loss, that Mrs. Heiberg has left the theater!” 215
Fritz and His Tormentors 217
“—and when I grew dizzy through gazing down into her infinite devotion” 220
1859
“They played mostly dance music” 224
The French Officer—A Little Weakness 227
The Collectively Unutterable and Some Stolen Reflections 229
Birthdays—and Other Fatalities 234
Part 2
1860–1896
“. . . I am not looking forward to coming to Copenhagen” 241
Homecoming and the Time That Followed 242
Regine’s Copenhagen and Environs 246
“. . . a word or two about the dear Fritz” 250
“I cannot be quit of this relationship” 252
“so close to me that it was almost a collision” 256
“. . . my heart is deeply grieved over my poor native land” 259
Regine’s Boarding House 262
The Schlegels’ “Place on the Corner” 263
“Alas, I am indeed somewhat spectral” 267
Regine’s Myth and Brandes’s Biography 271
Fireburn: Fritz’s Reencounter with the West Indies 276
Exit to Eternity 279
Part 3
1897–1904
“Then comes a dream from my youth’s spring . . .” 285
The Right to Regine’s Love Story 287
“. . . he is the riddle, the great riddle” 290
“ ‘our own dear, little Regine’ ” 293
Postscript and Acknowledgments 297
Notes 299
Illustration Credits 309
Name Index 311
What People are Saying About This
“A moving, penetrating insight into one of the greatest and most perplexing love stories in literary history, written with the same scholarly vigilance and imaginative affection that made Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard such a monumental achievement. . . . [G]oes further than any previous attempt to explore and understand the relationship between Regine and Kierkegaard.”—Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books“Garff is both a punctilious scholar and superb writer.”—Frank Freeman, Commonweal Magazine“A measured, perceptive portrait of Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard’s jilted fiancée, reanimating her not as the philosopher’s immortalized muse but as a living, breathing person.”—Publishers Weekly