”The Don-Juan flâneur in Copenhagen. A reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s Forførerens Dagbog”

The representation of contemporary Copenhagen in Kierkegaard’s Forførerens Dagbog (The Seducer’s Diary) (1843) makes the city a subject of the novel, not just the setting. It encompasses urban space and architecture, as well as the natural environment in and around the Danish capital. The novel, part of the larger unit called Enten – Eller (Either/Or), is the last in a series of texts that the fictional editor Victor Eremita attributes to A, the aesthetic man, before the second part begins, in which B, the ethical man, replies to A. This article attempts to analyse Forførerens Dagbog as an urban novel in relation to the myth of Don Juan, to the emergence of the flâneur in Paris, to the rise of the novel as a genre, and to the configuration of space and time in this novel. The aim is to connect these threads and shed some new light on a masterpiece of 19th-century Scandinavian literature. The novel proves to be an highly original adaptation of both the Don-Juan tradition and of the more recent flaneur, who appeared on the Parisian street but is 'imported' and actualised by Kierkegaard on the streets of Copenhagen. Such adaptations are instrumental to the role of the novel "The Seducer's Diary" within the broader structure of the aesthetic-ethical inquiry put forward in "Enten - Eller".