Chronology
CHRONOLOGY
1756
Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, Søren's father, born in formal bondage of peasant stock in Sreding, West Jutland. Baptized 12 December.
1768
Michael Kierkegaard apprenticed to his uncle, a hosier, in Copenhagen. Ane Sørensdatter Lund, Søren's mother, born 18 June in south-east Jutland.
1777
The Sreding village priest formally releases Michael Kierkegaard from serfdom.
1788
Michael Kierkegaard receives royal patent ‘to deal in East Indian and Chinese goods, as well as goods coming from our West Indian islands… and to sell same at wholesale or retail to all and sundry’. This was the year that Arthur Schopenhauer was born.
1794
Michael Kierkegaard marries Kirstine Røyen, sister of a business partner.
1796
23 March, Kirstine Røyen Kierkegaard dies childless; Michael Kierkegaard inherits from his uncle and benefactor.
1797
Michael Kierkegaard retires from business in February. On 26 April, he marries Kirstine's maid, and his own distant cousin, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, at the family home on Købmagergade in Copenhagen. A daughter, Maren Kirstine, is born 7 September.
1799
25 October, a second daughter, Nicoline Christine, is born.
1801
7 September, a third, Petrea Severine, is born.
1805
A first son, Peter Christian, is born.
1807
23 March, a second son, Søren Michael, is born.
1808
The year in which Hans Lassen Martensen, Kierkegaard's tutor to be, rival and bitter opponent, was born.
1809
30 April, a third son, Niels Andrea, is born.
1813
5 May, a last child, Søren Aabye, is born at home (2 Nytorv), and baptized in the Church of the Holy Spirit 3 June. This was the year the State Bank was declared bankrupt, as a result of economic problems stemming from the bombardment of Copenhagen by the British fleet in 1807 and Denmark's continuing alliance with Napoleon. Other notable figures born that year were the composers Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi.
1819
14 September, Kierkegaard's brother Søren Michael dies, aged twelve.
1821
Kierkegaard begins school at Copenhagen's Borgerdydskole.
1822
15 March, Maren Kirstine, Michael Kierkegaard's favourite daughter, dies, aged twenty-four.
1823
15 February, Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard's future fiancée, is born.
1828
20 April, Kierkegaard is confirmed in the Church of Our Lady by Pastor (later Bishop) J. P. Mynster.
1830
The year of the July Revolution, a three-day revolt in Paris that ends the Bourbon restoration, with its tightened control of the press and universities, and results in some degree of liberal reform. In Denmark, as elsewhere, one effect of the revolt was to consolidate the lobby for freedom of the press. Kierkegaard, who later takes part in the dispute over press freedom, graduates from the Borgerdydskole (with distinction in Greek, history, French and Danish composition) and on 30 October enters the University of Copenhagen. On 1 November he enlists in the King's Lifeguard, but four days later is discharged as unfit for service. His brother Peter Christian (known in academic circles as ‘the disputing devil of the North’), who was in Paris at the time of the July Revolution, receives a doctorate from the University of Göttingen for a dissertation on telling lies.
1831
25 April, Kierkegaard takes the first part of the first-year university exam (with distinction in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and history, and exceptional distinction in lower mathematics), and on 27 October the second part (with exceptional distinction in all subjects: theoretical and practical philosophy, physics and higher mathematics). This was the year that Hegel, whose influence on Danish philosophy provoked Kierkegaard's later onslaught on Hegelianism, died.
1832
Kierkegaard's 33-year-old sister Nicoline Christine (married to a clothier, Johan Christian Lund) dies after childbirth.
1832
His brother Niels Andreas emigrates to the USA to pursue a business career.
1833
21 September, Niels Andreas dies, twenty-four years old, in Paterson, New Jersey.
1834
31 July, his mother dies. 4 December, he makes his journalistic debut, under the imprint ‘A’, with a piece in Flyveposten (The Flying Post) entitled ‘Also a Defence of Woman's Superior Capacity’, in response to an article on the same theme. 29 December, his sister Petrea Severine (married to a banker, Heinrich Ferdinand Lund) dies after childbirth. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Christian theologian and philosopher, also died this year, having visited and been fêted in Copenhagen only the year before.
1835
He spends a summer holiday at Gilleleje in northern Sjælland. Records his resolve ‘to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.’ 28 November, he reads a paper to the Student Union on ‘Our Journal Literature’ with reference to freedom of the press.
1836
He publishes (in Flyveposten and under the imprint ‘B’, but finally under his own name) three articles in an exchange on the topic of the paper delivered to the Student Union. Later in the year, his surviving brother Peter Christian marries and the couple make their home at 2 Nytorv.
1837
In May, he meets Regine Olsen (then fifteen years old) for the first time while visiting the Rørdam family in Frederiksberg. In September, he begins teaching Latin at the Borgerdysdskole and moves from Nytorv to his own apartment at 7 Løvstraede. In July, Peter Christian's young wife dies.
1838
13 March, Kierkegaard's mentor and mainstay, Poul Martin Møller, dies at forty-four. 9 August, his father dies and he inherits a sum amounting to near half a million dollars. In September he publishes his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, attacking Hans Christian Andersen.
1839–40
He studies assiduously. In the winter he moves into an apartment at 11 Kultorvet, which he shares with another student. Ten months later he moves again, to 230A (now 38) Nørregade.
1840
He finally passes his examination for the theological degree (with distinction, though not at the top of the class), visits his ancestral home in Jutland, and, 10 September (having ‘approached her for a month’), proposes to Regine Olsen, who is now eighteen years old to his twenty-seven. She accepts. In November, Kierkegaard enters the pastoral seminary for practical training in the ministry.
1841
12 January, he preaches a sermon in Holmen's Church. In July, his dissertation for the M.A. (later Ph.D.) degree. ‘On the Concept of Irony’, is accepted for public defence. 11 August, he breaks his engagement to Regine. 29 September, he successfully defends his dissertation. 11 October, the break with Regine is complete; 25 October, he leaves by ship for Berlin. He attends Schelling's lectures in Berlin, among others.
1842
Having written large parts of Either/Or in Berlin, he returns in March to Copenhagen to complete the work. Begins, but does not complete, or publish, ‘De Omnibus Dubitandum Est’. Copenhagen this year saw the birth of Georg Brandes, a Danish intellectual who was to become an internationally famous literary critic and tried too late to interest Nietzsche in Kierkegaard's work.
1843
15 February, Either/Or published. May, he briefly visits Berlin. 8 May, two days before his departure, Two Edifying Discourses was published, followed 7 October by Fear and Trembling and Repetition, 13 October by Three Edifying Discourses, and 6 December by Four Edifying Discourses.
1844
24 February, Kierkegaard held, in the Church of the Trinity, and with ‘distinction’, the trial sermon required for entry into the Danish Church. Two Edifying Discourses and Three Edifying Discourses were published 5 March and 8 June respectively. Then in June Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces. In August followed Four Edifying Discourses. In October, he moves from 230A Nørregade back to the family house at 2 Nytorv. In the wider world, on which these works would later have some impact, this year saw the birth of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose father was born the same year as Kierkegaard.
1845
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and Stages on Life's Way are published in April on successive days. In May, he is away for two weeks on a brief visit to Berlin.
1846
In January, The Corsair, responding to a provocation signed by one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, attacks him in person. He briefly considers becoming a country pastor. Concluding Unscientific Postscript is published 27 February, followed on 30 March by A Literary Review. In May, he is absent once more from Copenhagen for a two-week trip to Berlin. In October, Meyer Goldschmidt, the editor of The Corsair and formerly a protégé of Kierkegaard, resigns and leaves Denmark.
1847
13 March, Edifying Discourses in a Different Tenor is published; 29 September, Works of Love. His publisher informs him that Either/Or is sold out. On 16 May, his rival and former tutor, Hans Lassen Martensen, is appointed Royal Chaplain. On 3 November, Regine marries her former teacher Friedrich Schlegel. In December, Kierkegaard sells the family home a 2 Nytorv. During the year he has twice visited his brother, now remarried and pastor at an out-of-town-parish at Pedersborg, near Sorø. Abroad, Marx and Engels are drafting the Communist Manifesto, which came out the following year.
1848
The year of the February Revolution in France with repercussions throughout Europe. These include the Dano-Prussian war over Schleswig-Holstein. His servant is drafted. Just previously, 20 January, King Christian VIII, with whom Kierkegaard had at least two audiences, had died. On 28 January, he had signed a lease on an apartment at the corner of Rosenborggade and Tornebuskgade and in April moved in. On 26 April, Christian Discourses is published and 24 and 27 July the two-part article, ‘The Crisis and a Crisis in an Actress's Life’. By November he has finished The Point of View of My Work as an Author but decides not to have it published in his lifetime. The year was also the gestation period for The Sickness unto Death, some conception for which is first mentioned in a journal entry from 28 December 1847.
1849
The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air and Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises are published 14 and 19 May respectively. The Sickness unto Death is published 30 July under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, and Three Discourses at Communion on Fridays 13 November.
1850
18 April, he moves to yet another apartment, at 43 Nørregade. Practice in Christianity is published under the Anti-Climacus pseudonym 27 September and An Edifying Discourse 20 December.
1851
In April, he moves outside the old city's walls to 108A Østerbro. On 18 May he gave a sermon at the Citadel Church, in August published Two Discourses at Communion on Fridays and On My Work as an Author, and 10 September For Self-Examination.
1852–3
In April, he moves back inside the city to a small two-room flat let out of a larger apartment at Klaedeboderne 5–6 (now 28 Skindergade and 5 Dyrkøb), just opposite the Church of Our Lady. Judge for Yourself is completed but not published until twenty-one years after his death. In his journals he reflects over his ‘life's operation’.
1854
30 January, Bishop Mynster dies. In February, Kierkegaard writes an article attacking the established church, but does not publish it until December. Hans Martensen is named Bishop 15 April. Rather than provoking reaction, publication of the article causes some confusion.
1855
From January to the end of May, he attacks the church in various articles published in Faedrelandet. In this final year he publishes: 24 May, This Must Be Said, So Let It Now Be Said; 16 June, Christ's Judgment on Official Christianity; and 3 September, The Unchangeableness of God. In May he begins his own broadsheet, The Instant. It goes through nine issues before he falls ill. On 2 October, he collapses outside his home and is taken later, at his own request, to Frederiks Hospital. He dies there six weeks later, at 9 p.m., 11 November, probably of a staphylococcus infection of the lungs, though there was no autopsy. His funeral, at the prompting of his brother Peter Christian, but much to Martensen's distaste, was conducted at the Church of Our Lady, attracting people of all classes, while the burial itself was the occasion of a disturbance in which Kierkegaard's devoted but overwrought nephew deplored the fact that the Church (at his older uncle's instigation) had commandeered the proceedings.
1859
The Point of View of my Authorship is published by Peter Christian Kierkegaard.
1860
The death of Arthur Schopenhauer (b. 1788), whose works Kierkegaard first read with admiration and mixed appreciation in 1854.
1884
Hans Lassen Martensen dies.
1888
24 February, Peter Christian Kierkegaard dies, aged eighty-two, his mind unbalanced. Thirteen years earlier, he resigned his episcopate in Aalborg (1856–75) and resigned his civic rights, placing himself in legal custody.
1904
Regine Schlegel dies. Her husband, Fritz Schlegel, governor of the Danish West Indies from 1855 until 1860 (on his deathbed Kierkegaard jibed that Regine had always wanted to be a ‘governess’) and later an important city official in Copenhagen, had died in 1896.