Kierkegaard Life · Copenhagen · 1813–1855

Søren Kierkegaard Timeline

A timeline of Kierkegaard's life, writings, and pseudonyms.

Forty-two years, roughly forty published works, and a habit of releasing two books on the same day under different names. Filter by authorship below to see the two streams running in parallel: the pseudonymous works, and the discourses he signed with his own name.

Kierkegaard's signature
42Years lived
40Works listed
11Pseudonyms
6Books in 1843
3Trips to Berlin
Publications per year. Click a bar to jump.

The authorship key

Kierkegaard published two bodies of work at once, often on the same day: books under invented names, and discourses under his own. Colour marks the category on the timeline above, but every card also carries the name it was published under, so the colour is never the only signal.

The pseudonyms. Victor Eremita · Johannes de Silentio · Constantin Constantius · Johannes Climacus · Vigilius Haufniensis · Nicolaus Notabene · Hilarius Bogbinder · Frater Taciturnus · Inter et Inter · H.H. · Anti-Climacus

Sources and method

Titles and dates. English titles are given first, with the original Danish beneath. Danish titles keep the orthography of the printed title pages rather than modern spelling, so Frygt og Bœven appears as it was set in 1843.

Where works sit. Entries are placed at the year of publication, except for two written but withheld. The Point of View for my Work as an Author was finished in 1848 and published posthumously in 1859. Judge For Yourselves! was written in 1851 and published in 1876. Both sit at the year of writing and carry a badge saying so, because the point of the timeline is when he was working, not when the estate got around to printing.

Images. Every photograph here is a public-domain scan from Wikimedia Commons, and each one links to its source file in the detail panel. Most are first-edition title pages. Where no public-domain photograph of an edition exists, a typographic facsimile stands in its place and is labelled facsimile in the panel. A facsimile is a tile set in the style of Reitzel's title pages. It is not a reproduction of any actual copy, and is not presented as one.

What is not here. The journals and papers, which run to more volumes than the published authorship, are out of scope for now.