The Seducer's Diary

Synopsis

"in the vast literature of love, the seducer's diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast, " observes john updike in his foreword to søren kierkegaard's narrative. This work, a chapter from kierkegaard's first major volume, either/or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, regine olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected kierkegaard profoundly.