Regines gåde. Historien on Kierkegaards forlovede og Schlegels hustru by Joakim Garff (review)

Many of the mysteries of Søren Kierkegaard’s personal life will likely never be fully explained, thanks to his careful self-censorship and layered writing style. Kierkegaard enjoyed his enigmatic status and understood the power with which it invested his works; he noted in his diary in 1849, “God has given me the strength to be able to exist as a riddle” (qtd. in Garff 16). The enigma of his relationship to his onetime fiancée Regine Olsen has fascinated and frustrated Kierkegaard scholars for nearly two centuries. In Regines gåde. Historien on Kierkegaards forlovede og Schlegels hustru (Regine’s Mystery. The Story of Kierkegaard’s Fiancée and Schlegel’s Wife), Joakim Garff offers not the solution to this riddle, but rather an account of how Regine herself gradually became caught up in it, despite the strain it placed on her marriage to Frits Schlegel. With empathy and intellectual rigor, Garff draws on a trove of previously unknown letters from Regine to her sister Cornelia Winning to shed light on the mystery of Regine herself and her thoughts about her relationship with the voluble but cryptic philosopher.

What allowed Garff to succeed at getting a glimpse into Regine’s mind and heart where so many others have failed was a biographer’s miracle. After giving a lecture on Kierkegaard in a small town in the summer of 1996, Garff met Agnete Trude, the granddaughter of Regine’s sister Cornelia, who let him read the 100+ letters between the sisters in her possession. The letters were written primarily during Regine’s years on the island of St. Croix, where Schlegel was governor from 1855 to 1859. Given that Regina left no diary, the only access readers have had to her perspective has, until now, been through Kierkegaard’s descriptions of her and her own brief, circumspect remarks after her husband’s death, more than sixty years after the fact. Toward the end of her life, she became increasingly invested in defending Kierkegaard’s legacy, but not her own role in it. In her letters, therefore, Garff discovered not only much of Regine’s missing side of the story, but also her own voice, if only her public one.

In this new book, published thirteen years after his masterful biography of Søren Kierkegaard, Garff skillfully coaxes the details of Regina’s life and identity from her letters, with reference to both their historical context and their personal subtexts. Garff does not limit Regine to being a “decorative porcelain figure without anything inside, but the woman of flesh and blood and opinions and desires that she was in reality” (13). He reveals her to be an actor in her own play, not just the object of Kierkegaard’s attentions or the helpless victim of his manipulation. Garff explains in his preface,

The main character in this book is just as much the girl who was engaged to Søren Kierkegaard for a year, as it is the woman who was married to Johan Frederik Schlegel for more than a human lifespan. The book is therefore—also—about the life that awaited Regine on the other side of Kierkegaard; it follows her comings and goings, circumscribes moods and conditions and tells thereby stories of everyday life from a vanished time.

(13)

Garff conjures up that “vanished time” in exquisite detail. He proceeds methodically through Regine’s letters and notes, year by year, unpacking Regine’s reports about her experiences in the Danish West Indies, her life with her husband, her memories of Kierkegaard, and her shifting awareness of her own prominent position in his personal mythology. He interweaves Regine’s letters with biographical details, relevant excerpts from Kierkegaard’s diaries, and historical information about the Danish Virgin Islands. As a result, the book is much more than a biography of a single person or the unraveling of a love triangle; it maps a web of relationships, between Regine and her sister...