Il diario del Seduttore

[Autom. eng. transl.] A symbolic work of Kierkegaard's aesthetic production, and central script of the famous Enten-Eller collection released in Copenhagen in 1843, the Seducer's Diary is the ambiguous report - in part epistolary, partly diary-like - of a refined and morbid story of seduction. In the exacerbated soul of the esthete Johannes, the anguish of Faust and the sensual guile of Don Giovanni are combined to give life to a demonic poet at whose feet a young Cordelia is fatally destined to succumb. In the melancholy and exalted world of Johannes, reality and dream, life and theater, are confused dialectically. People act as Johannes only as a stimulus, he rejects them as the trees drop the leaves: he rejuvenates while the foliage is inexorably destined to dry. And yet, even in the deepest affliction, Cordelia cannot hate the man who seduced her and then abandoned her, her feelings are prisoners of an ambiguity that is also the result of the seducer's powerful manipulative ability. For Johannes, therefore, seduction is a "serious game", a narcissistic labyrinth concluded in itself as a trap from which one cannot get out unless one enters the deepest part of oneself, to the point of touching that abyss of anguish that only leads to a existential choice: aut-aut, a choice of which Johannes however is not capable. The way out, Kierkegaard will show it only in later works, with the production of a series of edifying writings, viaticum in the direction of the religious.