Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 40: August 2000

Ind i Verdens Vrimmel: Søren Kierkegaards Ukendte Bror.

By Flemming Chr. Nielsen. Holkenfeldt, 1998, 191 p.

Stacey Elizabeth Ake

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

Copenhagen, Denmark

The title of this book, Ind i Verdens Vrimmel, takes as its name a play on the Danish translation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, namely Fjernt fra Verdens Vrimmel. Nielsen’s book is not, however, about a tragic and pathetic love story. It is instead about Søren Kierkegaard’s lesser known elder brother. Tragic and melancholy love stories, it seems, were to be left as the exclusive purview of the younger sibling.

The book is, essentially, a mystery – but of the more academic kind. It falls under the rubric of what Joakim Garff calls “Documenta(fic)tion” or what Umberto Eco might consider a novel. By using the scant evidence at his disposal, mostly in the form of personal letters, Nielsen constructs a story – a series of hypotheses, in fact – of what might have been the reasons and events leading Niels Andreas Kierkegaard, the poor soul sandwiched between Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s two stellar surviving sons, Peter Christian and Søren Aabye, to flee Denmark for the New World in late August of 1832. He would eventually die there a little over a year later in September of 1833, having ventured everything and gained nothing.

As a collection of documents substantiating Niels Andreas’ life and activities it is indispensable. As a novel, it lacks some luster due to the presentation of new hypotheses in a rather desultory fashion more akin to journalism than literature. By comparison, it can be said that it shares this fault with a similar book out now in English: namely, Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and The Making of Oxford English Dictionary (HaperCollins, 1998, 242 pp.) In both cases, the journalist-detective’s enthusiasm for mystery outpaces the literary novelist’s need to create tension and advance a plot. And yet like all diamonds in the rough, there are moments that shine, as on p. 105 where Nielsen writes “Det er uhygge at få brev fra en prœst, når man venter ét fra sin søn.” It is awful to get a letter from a priest when you’re expecting one from your son. As indeed it must have been for Michael Pedersen and Anne Sørensdatter the day a strange letter from a strange priest in a strange language arrived at their door.

And it is moments such as these that lead me to believe that we have the wrong Thomas. It is not Thomas Hardy’s madding crowd but rather that of his predecessor, Thomas Gray, that the title refers to. The madding crowd found in the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” And, yes, ironies would, it seems, abound. For consider how the epitaph at the end of the elegy begins:

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,

And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.

If it was Nielsen’s intention with his book to bring to the public’s attention that even Niels Andreas Kierkegaard was not without that melancholy that befits a true Kierkegaard, then he has succeeded.