S©ıren Kierkegaard

With Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard intended to conclude the signed "second authorship" following Concluding Unscientific Postscript as the end of the pseudonymous writings. Parts One and Three, "The Cares of the Pagans" and "Thoughts That Wound from Behind--for Upbuilding," contain a polemical element and constitute the overture to the collision with the established order of Christendom. The dominant theme of Parts Two and Four, "Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering" and "Discourses at the Communion on Fridays," is a reassuring affirmation of the joy and blessedness of the Christian life in a world of adversity and suffering. Written in ordinary language, the work combines simplicity and inwardness with reflection and presents crucial Christian concepts and presuppositions with unusual clarity. Among the discourses are some of Kierkegaard's masterpieces.The first pseudonymous esthetic work, Either/Or, was accompanied by a series of religious discourses. To maintain the dialectical structure of the dual authorship, Kierkegaard wrote an accompanying work to Christian Discourses: an esthetic essay on a foremost Danish actress. To her, it was a "wonderful surprise to read [how] the inspired theoretician manages to express clearly and unambiguously what one has felt without being able to find the words to clarify and illustrate this feeling."

The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

Christian Discourses

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard's narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard's first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of "indirect communication." The Seducer's Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard's attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her. Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

The Seducer's Diary

The Sickness Unto Death

Prefaces was the last of four books by Søren Kierkegaard to appear within a space of two weeks in June 1844. Three Upbuilding Discourses and Philosophical Fragments were published first, followed by The Concept of Anxiety. This last volume, altlhough it had the usual complement of an upbuilding work, also had a companion of a different kind, the comically ironic Prefaces, published on the same day. Presented as a set of prefaces without a book to follow, this work is a satire on literary life in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, a lampoon of Danish Hegelianism, and a prefiguring of Kierkegaard's final collision with Danish Christendom. At the same time it tightly expresses themes characteristic of the entire authorship, including subjectivity and Christian devotion.Shortly after publishing Prefaces, Kierkegaard began to prepare Writing Sampler as a sequel. This next work considers the themes of Prefaces but in yet a more ironical and satirical vein. Writing Sampler remained among Kierkegaard's unpublished writings during his lifetime and appears here for the first time as Kierkegaard originally envisioned it, in the company of Prefaces.

S©ıren Kierkegaard

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