The thread we have been following in the preceding chapters has been provided by Kierkegaard's critical judgement of the times in which he lived and, more specifically, of the cultural life of his contemporary Copenhagen. But how did Kierkegaard himself – or, more precisely, his writings – appear to his contemporaries? And which of those contemporaries were interested in it, and why? In this chapter I shall attempt to open up these questions with particular reference to Either/Or, his third book, but the first of what he was himself to refer to as his ‘authorship’, the sequence of pseudonymous works and their accompanying religious discourses that ran from Either/Or itself through to Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Either/Or was made available to the Danish reading public on 20 February 1843 by C. A. Reitzel, University bookseller and publisher in Copenhagen, at a cost of four dollars, four marks and eight shillings per copy. Within two years the entire edition of five hundred and twenty-five copies had been sold, making it (by the standards of the day) a literary success. A second edition followed in 1849, and since then it has been translated into a wide variety of languages, riding on and spreading the fame of its now acknowledged author, Søren Kierkegaard.