François-René de Chateaubriand: The Eloquent Society of ∑vµπαϱvεkϱωµενοι

Whoever would like to draw a comparison between the Danish thinker and the French poet will soon realize that two lines of inquiry are equally open in this direction: that of the explicit traces of Kierkegaard’s reading of Chateaubriand, and that of the unaware consonances. The former is the most complicated, even if it could appear to be the easier one, since even if it is based on something “visible”, – that is, Kierkegaard’s explicit reference to of Chateaubriand’s words in his writings –, there is not a real criterion to establish whether Kierkegaard really red the works he quotes, or simply had a second-hand knowledge of them, as sometimes seems to be the case. Further, we cannot know whether some references to the poet merely have the value of a simple literary allusion, or whether, on the contrary, they hide much more than what they immediately reveal, like the top of an ice-berg. This latter hypothesis, for example, has previously received detailed attention by H.P. Rohde, in his essay Gaadefulde stadier paa Kierkegaards vej (1974) , which we will consider in more detail below. Moreover, it is also true that Kierkegaard did not quote Chateaubriand very frequently