I Banish You

Kierkegaard’s theatricality, sensitivity, and sense of importance, are evident in his diary entries during 1848-49, when he was under fairly scathing attack from the journal The Corsair . One entry reads:

“And even though Denmark were willing to do so, it is very questionable whether Denmark could make good the wrong it has done me. That I am an author in whom Denmark will undoubtedly take prise, is certain; that, qua author, I have lived, to all intents and purposes, at my own expense and without assistance from government or people, have borne a continuous literary production without the smallest literary support from a periodical because I saw how small the country was: and then to have had such treatment, my biggest work not even reviewed – the machinery of the whole plan hardly suspected: and then its author marked out by all that is vulgar and known to every shoemaker’s boy who in the name of ‘public opinion’ insults him on the street (for the press after all is public opinion): no, no Denmark has condemned itself.”