ABSTRACT
Of all Danish authors of the generation following the death of Søren Kierkegaard, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a single figure less likely to have been significantly impacted by him than Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-85). It is indeed true that the group of writers that the critic Georg Brandes would identify as the “Men of the Modern Breakthrough,” which included the Norwegians Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsen as well as Danes such as Holger Drachmann and Jacobsen, made much of their status as having emerged from a virtual literary and ideological vacuum. In an essay written shortly before the “official” launching of the Breakthrough in 1871, Brandes had stressed this sense of absolute rupture, declaring that the literary epoch later termed the Danish Golden Age, that period which had produced Adam Oehlenschläger and Johan Ludvig Heiberg as well as Kierkegaard, was in effect “completed” and could no longer provide effective models for the emerging group of young writers.1 The degree of truth in this sense of a complete break with the past remains to us, of course, subject to debate. Even Ibsen, as famously averse to the acknowledgment of influence as he was, began his cycle of world-historical plays with Brand (1866),2 which by any reasonable accounting constitutes at the very least a serious entertainment of Kierkegaardian themes, in particular the power (and the peril) of religious passion. Bjørnson’s less memorable response to Ibsen,
Beyond Our Power (1883),3 constitutes no less a direct engagement with the Danish philosopher and theologian, albeit a categorical rejection of Kierkegaard’s perceived weaknesses.
