The eight volumes preceding the present one have undertaken the critical re-edition of Notabene's published authorship of 1844–47. The present volume departs from that programme in three respects: it contains no work by Notabene; it stands outside the editorial fiction by which the eight earlier volumes (and indeed the original Forord of 1844 under Notabene's name) sustain themselves; and it is the only volume of the set for which the present editor has solicited a substantial contribution from a hand other than his own.

The volume is a biographical and documentary companion, intended to supply the reader of the phantom-volume corpus with such circumstantial materials as bear upon its understanding. The materials assembled here are of four kinds.

First, a chronology of Notabene's life, drawn from the surviving parish registers of the parishes of Vor Frue (Copenhagen), Frederiksværk, and Frederiksborg, supplemented by the Reitzel-arkivet correspondence and by the small body of personal papers preserved in the Notabene-arkivet (Kgl. Bibl., NKS 4° 3204). The chronology is, in its principal features, no longer in dispute; the standard biography by Asger Vibskov (1958) remains the foundation of modern scholarship, and the present chronology departs from Vibskov's only in such particulars as the 2019 discovery of the Reitzel-attic materials has occasioned.

Second, a dramatis personae — the small circle of persons whose lives bear materially on Notabene's. The longest entry concerns Notabene's wife, who is identified throughout the present companion only as N. N.'s Hustru (his wife), in conformity with the practice of all the contemporary documents which mention her (including the Skilsmissebrev reproduced in § IV). The reasons for this practice — and the disputed scholarly question whether her anonymity is a deliberate biographical condition or merely an accident of documentary loss — are discussed in the entry itself.

Third, a set of documentary reproductions: the Skilsmissebrev of August 1846 (witness in the Sagaktiv of the parish of Vor Frelser), with the present editor's English translation; the surviving fragment of the burnt Indlednings-Paragrapher of spring 1843, reconstructed from the singed leaves preserved among the Notabene-arkivet materials; and a Bibliography of Works Forbidden — that is, of the manuscripts Notabene attempted, between 1832 and 1843, before the Forord compromise was reached, all of which were either confiscated, destroyed, or abandoned in draft.

Fourth, a selection of Notabene's correspondence with C. A. Reitzel, 1844–47, in which the principal documentary record of the eight phantom volumes' production is contained.

The volume closes with the present editor's most important departure from his own practice. The essay Notabenes sene Tavshed by Asger Vibskov, first published in Kierkegaardiana vol. III (1962), pp. 88–112, is reprinted as the volume's concluding chapter. Vibskov (b. 1918, d. 2007) was, of the twentieth-century Notabene scholars, the one whose work most directly bears on the questions of authorship, motive, and biographical context which the eight phantom volumes leave open. His 1962 essay has remained, for sixty years, the principal modern statement of the problem of Notabene's late silence — that is, of the question why, after the publication of Smaastykker in February 1847, Notabene wrote nothing further during the remaining eleven years of his life. The essay is reproduced here by kind permission of Kierkegaardiana and of the Vibskov estate, with only such silent corrections of typography as the Forskningscentret's Editorial Principles (2018) require.

The present editor has not attempted to bring Vibskov's essay into agreement with the conclusions of the apparatus of the eight phantom volumes. Where the two diverge, the divergences are documented in the apparatus to the essay; the reader is asked to weigh them on the evidence rather than on editorial authority. Vibskov wrote in 1962 with materials substantially less complete than those now available, but his judgement of the matters that the materials do permit one to judge has, in the present editor's view, not been substantially superseded.

A final editorial remark. The reader who has come to the present volume from the eight that precede it will find that the materials assembled here corroborate, in their broad outlines, what the phantom volumes themselves indicate about their author's circumstances; and that the materials add, to those circumstances, certain particulars (the wife's reading-society engagements; the brother-in-law's role in the divorce proceedings; the aunt's death and her bequest of the Frederiksværk library to Notabene in 1846) which the phantom volumes pass over in silence. The companion is intended to supply such particulars without claiming for them an interpretive priority over the literary works themselves. Notabene the author and Notabene the man are continuous, but they are not, in the present editor's view, the same; the man's biography may inform the reading of the author, but it cannot, on its own, constitute the reading. The reader is asked to bear this in mind in turning the pages that follow.

— M. F. H. Forskningscentret, December 2024

1805, 14 April. Born in the parish of Frederiksborg-Slot, Nordsjælland, the second son of Kammerraad Hans Christian Bentzon (1768–1834), a minor civil servant in the chancellery, and Frue Marie Bentzon, née Vibe (1774–1838). The family was of the modest gentry: ancestral lands in the Frederiksværk district of approximately fifty tønder hartkorn, supplying a modest annual income; a townhouse in Bredgade (Copenhagen) of which the family occupied two stories and let the third. The infant was given the names Nicolaus Christian Bentzon. The surname Notabene is, in the present editor's view, certainly a chosen literary name, adopted no later than 1832 and probably as early as 1828 (the year of the cand. theol. examination, on which see below); the question of its precise adoption-date is treated in Vibskov (1958, ch. 1).

1814–1822. Schooled at the Borgerdydskolen in Copenhagen, where he was a contemporary of, among others, Søren Kierkegaard's elder brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–1888). The Borgerdyd records (Kgl. Bibl., Borgerdydskolens Arkiv, Akter 1818–22) preserve his examination results, which are uniformly creditable without being remarkable; he distinguished himself principally in Greek and in Latin composition.

1822–1828. Studied theology at the University of Copenhagen. He passed the Embedseksamen (cand. theol.) on 6 July 1828 with the grade Haud illaudabilis, in a cohort which included two later bishops and four authors of subsequent note. The University records (Universitetsarkiv, Theologisk Fakultet, Eksamensprotokol 1828) indicate that his examination disputation concerned the relation of natural theology to revealed; the manuscript of the disputation has not been traced.

1828, August. Was, by all indications, expected by his family to seek ordination and accept a parish call. He did not. His reasons for declining to seek ordination have been the subject of speculation; the present editor finds nothing in the surviving correspondence that bears decisively on the question. He returned to the Frederiksværk estate, where he lived on the rents from his late father's properties, and devoted himself to literary projects of which the Bibliography of Works Forbidden (§ V below) supplies what record survives.

1829, autumn. First engagement — to a Frøken whose name is recorded only as Frøken H. in his diary (the diary is fragmentary, preserved in the Notabene-arkivet as NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 1, only one quire surviving). The engagement was dissolved by mutual consent in December 1829 on grounds the diary does not specify.

1830, March. Second engagement, to the woman who became his wife. The diary records the engagement and the wife's name with the formula min Forlovede, hvis Navn jeg af ydre Hensyn ikke nedskriver her ("my fiancée, whose name I do not for outward reasons record here"). The wife's name does not appear, in any document available to the present editor, in any source: not in the marriage register, where the bride's name is recorded only by her father's surname and a blank; not in the parish records of subsequent residence, where she appears only as Hustruen (the wife); not in the Skilsmissebrev of 1846, in which she is the unnamed Sagsøgerinden (the plaintiff). The scholarly literature has been unable to identify her by any conventional historical means; the question of her anonymity is treated at length in the dramatis personae entry below (§ III) and in Vibskov (1958, ch. 4).

1830, 24 June. Marriage in the parish of Vor Frue, Copenhagen. The marriage register (Kbhvn., Vor Frue Sogn, Ægteskabsprotokol 1830, no. 73) records the date and Notabene's name in full; the bride is recorded only as "Datteren af afdøde Cand. Jur. F——, Frederiksberg" (the daughter of the late Cand. Jur. F——, Frederiksberg). The blank in the surname is unique in the protocol for the year 1830 and has occasioned considerable scholarly speculation. The most probable explanation, advanced by Vibskov (1958, p. 47), is that the protocol-clerk was instructed by Notabene to leave the surname blank pending the receipt of a certificate of the bride's family which had not arrived by the date of the wedding; the certificate not having been subsequently supplied, the blank was permitted to stand. The hypothesis is consistent with the haste of the marriage (banns having been read only twice rather than the customary three times, by special dispensation of the Bishop's office).

1830–1843. Notabene's wife, immediately upon the marriage, established the prohibition — namely, that Notabene was not, under any circumstances, to publish any book whatsoever. The grounds were, by Notabene's own subsequent account (in the Forord of 1844, opening paragraphs), an experience during the engagement in which she had heard him read aloud from one of his unpublished manuscripts and had found the experience intolerable; she had made his consent to silence a condition of her consent to the marriage. Notabene records, in his diary entry of 24 June 1830 (the wedding day), that "I have agreed to the condition without inquiring into its dimensions, the haste of the season being what it is" (NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 1, fol. 12r). The condition obtained, with such consequences as the Bibliography of Works Forbidden records, for the next thirteen years.

1843, 16 March. The Indlednings-Paragraph episode. Notabene, having drafted what he believed to be the opening paragraphs of a substantial new work (the manuscript now reproduced in fragmentary form as § VI below), brought the manuscript to the parlour at Christianshavn for fair copying. The wife, finding the manuscript, set it on fire with a parlour candle. Notabene's diary entry for the evening of 16 March 1843 (NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 2, fol. 31v) records the event in a single sentence: "I dag er Indledningen brændt." ("Today the Introduction has been burnt.") Three of the burnt leaves were recovered, partially singed, by the maid the following morning and preserved by Notabene without his wife's knowledge; their fragments are reproduced in § VI.

1843, May. Notabene proposes to his wife the compromise that, in the event, made the eight phantom volumes possible: namely, that he would publish prefaces — without the books they prefaced — at intervals of his own choosing, on the supposition that the prohibition extended only to books in the conventional sense and not to prefaces in vacuo. The wife, by Notabene's own account, accepted the compromise "on the supposition that no one writes a preface without writing a book; from which she concluded that the compromise would protect the prohibition rather than dissolve it" (Forord 1844, Til Læseren, § 3).

1843–1844. Drafts the eight prefaces. The drafts were composed, by Notabene's own account, in a room of the country estate at Frederiksværk, which had been bequeathed to him in 1834 on his father's death and to which he retreated for periods of weeks at a time during these years, his wife being told that he had gone for the air.

1844, 17 June. Publication of Forord, indeholdende Prøver til et nyt Tidsskrift under the Notabene pseudonym (the only one of the corpus published under that name during the relevant decade). The volume's eight prefaces prefigure the eight phantom volumes which the Wroot Press 2026 edition reproduces. The Forord itself stands outside the Wroot Press edition's principal series.

1844, 14 December. Publication of Urania. Aarbog for 1845 (Vol. IV of the present edition). The first of the eight phantom volumes — composed during the autumn of 1844 in the same Frederiksværk room.

1845, 8 January. Death of Notabene's aunt, Tante Vibeke Bentzon (1769–1845), at Frederiksværk. Her library — some 2,400 volumes — was bequeathed to Notabene by a will of 1841, of which the relevant codicil is preserved in the Hørsholm Birks-Tinglysningsprotokol for 1845. The library, transferred to the Frederiksværk estate, formed thereafter the principal physical resource of Notabene's writing.

1845, 26 December – 1846, May. Publication of Vols. I, III, V, VI, and VIII of the phantom corpus (see the chronological table in the front-matter of each of those volumes). Notabene during this period divides his time between the Frederiksværk estate (for composition) and the Christianshavn parlour (for residence with his wife).

1846, 14 August. The wife discovers, beneath her tea-saucer at the breakfast table on the morning of 14 August 1846, the Subscription Notice for Vol. II of the Logiske System, which Reitzel had sent under separate cover and which Notabene had not yet had occasion to remove from the breakfast room. The protocol of the subsequent legal proceedings (Sagaktiv, Vor Frelser parish, Skilsmissesag no. 47 of 1846) records the wife's testimony that she had, for some months prior to the discovery, "begyndt at fatte Mistanke om visse Uregelmæssigheder" (begun to entertain suspicions of certain irregularities), but had not, until that morning, possessed material proof. She does not appear to have confronted Notabene on the morning of 14 August; she rose from the breakfast table, went upstairs, packed, and left the house. Notabene's diary entry for 14 August 1846 reads: "Min Kone er gaaet. Jeg veed ikke hvor hen. Klokken er elleve om Formiddagen og Solen skinner som om intet var skeet." ("My wife is gone. I do not know where to. It is eleven o'clock in the morning and the sun shines as if nothing had happened.") The diary entry is reproduced in full in Vibskov (1958, p. 184).

1846, 28 August. The Skilsmissebrev, drafted by the wife's brother Procurator F. Lindahl (her family name and his being thus disclosed only at the legal proceedings, the disclosure being subsequently expunged from the publicly accessible records but preserved in the Sagaktiv), is delivered to Notabene at his Christianshavn address. The text of the Skilsmissebrev is reproduced in § IV below.

1846, September. Notabene's wife joins the Selskab for kvindelig Studie og Lectüre, the Society for Female Study and Reading, founded 1843 in Copenhagen by a small group of unmarried and separated women of the cultivated classes. The Society's records (Kgl. Bibl., Selskabet for kvindelig Studie og Lectüre, Forhandlings-Protocol 1843–1864, NKS 4° 2467) record her admission on 11 September 1846 under the formula Frue N. N. (the second N standing for née, with the surname suppressed at her request). She is recorded thereafter, in the Society's protocols, as a "virksomt Medlem" (active member) and as a participant in two of the Society's reading circles, on subjects which the protocols do not specify.

1846 winter. The divorce is granted, on grounds of vedvarende Utroskab ved Forfatterskab (persistent infidelity by means of authorship; on the legal novelty of the grounds, see Vibskov 1958, ch. 6). Notabene does not contest. The settlement provides that he shall retain the Frederiksværk estate and the Christianshavn lease; the wife shall receive an annuity of 600 Rigsdaler from the estate's rents, payable quarterly through her brother the Procurator.

1847, February. Publication of Philosophiske Smaastykker (Vol. VII of the present edition), Notabene's only signed work and the eighth of the phantom corpus.

1847, March – 1858. Notabene publishes nothing further. He retires to the Frederiksværk estate in the spring of 1847 and lives there, with occasional visits to Copenhagen, for the remaining eleven years of his life. The Notabene-arkivet contains no manuscript material in his hand later than April 1847 of a substantive literary character; what does survive consists of his estate-accounts, his correspondence with Reitzel and with his man of business in Frederiksværk, and one further diary fragment (NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 3) covering the years 1849–1853 in entries of increasing brevity. The question of Notabene's late silence is treated in Vibskov's essay (§ IX below).

1858, 22 November. Notabene dies at the Frederiksværk estate, of an inflammation of the lungs occasioned by an autumn chill. The parish register of Frederiksværk-Sogn records the death and the burial. He was 53 years old. No further heirs being known, the Frederiksværk estate passes to a cousin of the third degree on the Vibe side.

The wife outlived him by some thirty-one years, dying in 1889 at the age of 82, in the apartment on Nørregade where she had taken lodgings in 1846. She remained, throughout her life, an active member of the Selskab for kvindelig Studie og Lectüre, and is named in the Society's Mindetale for 1889 as one of its longest-serving members. The Society's records do not indicate that she ever spoke of, or referred to, her former husband.

The persons listed below are those whose lives bear materially upon Notabene's. The entries are summary; for biographical detail in any case, the reader is referred to the standard sources, of which Vibskov (1958) supplies the most ample treatment.

Notabene, Nicolaus (Nicolaus Christian Bentzon, 1805–1858). The subject of the present companion. Cand. theol. 1828, never ordained; small landed gentleman of the Frederiksværk district; author of the Forord* (1844) and the eight phantom volumes (1844–47).

Notabene's wife (unnamed in all sources; her family name was Lindahl, on which see below; born ca. 1808, died 1889). The daughter of Cand. Jur. F. Lindahl of Frederiksberg, a minor jurist who died in 1827; orphaned at nineteen, raised thereafter in the household of her elder brother. Married Notabene 24 June 1830; established the prohibition on his authorship at the time of the marriage; left him 14 August 1846; divorced him in the winter of 1846–47 on grounds of authorship-infidelity; joined the Selskab for kvindelig Studie og Lectüre September 1846; outlived Notabene by 31 years. Her anonymity in all surviving documents is unique, in Vibskov's view, in mid-nineteenth-century Copenhagen civil records; he attributes it (1958, ch. 4) to a deliberate condition of the marriage settlement, by which Notabene had agreed, in 1830, to suppress her name from any document over which he had control. The condition, if it existed, did not extend to the protocols of the Selskab, in which she nevertheless continues to be recorded only as Frue N. N. — suggesting, on Vibskov's reading, that the suppression had become, by 1846, her own preference rather than her husband's stipulation.

Procurator F. Lindahl (Frederik Lindahl, 1799–1871), Notabene's brother-in-law. A Copenhagen lawyer of moderate standing, with chambers on Frederiksberggade. Drafted the Skilsmissebrev of 1846 and represented his sister in the divorce proceedings of that autumn and winter. The relations between Lindahl and Notabene during the marriage are not documented; the Sagaktiv of 1846 indicates a measured professional posture rather than personal hostility. After his sister's settlement was concluded, Lindahl appears to have administered her quarterly annuity until his death in 1871. He was, in addition to his legal practice, a member of Reform-Foreningen in the 1840s and a contributor to Fædrelandet.

Tante Vibeke Bentzon (1769–1845), Notabene's paternal aunt. Unmarried; mistress of the Frederiksværk estate from 1820 until her death; principal source of Notabene's literary education in his childhood; her library, bequeathed to Notabene in 1841, was a working scholarly collection of some 2,400 volumes including the standard German speculative literature of the 1810s–1830s, the Greek and Roman classics in the standard Bipontine and Tauchnitz editions, the Danish theological literature of the eighteenth century, and a modest collection of mystical writings (Tauler, Suso, Boehme) which Notabene appears to have consulted with particular interest in the years 1844–47. Vibeke Bentzon's correspondence with her nephew (preserved in the Notabene-arkivet, NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 4) is the single most substantial body of Notabene's surviving letters from the period of the marriage.

C. A. Reitzel (Carl Andreas Reitzel, 1789–1853), publisher. Established his bookselling and publishing firm in 1819; principal publisher of Heiberg, Mynster, Martensen, and the Kierkegaard pseudonyms, as well as of Notabene; conservative in commercial habit and personally cautious in his relations with the authors of the Hovedstad's speculative tendency. His correspondence with Notabene, in selection, forms § VIII below.

Pastor V. C. Brammer (Vilhelm Christian Brammer, 1797–1881), of Trinitatis parish in Copenhagen, was Notabene's parish priest during the years of the Christianshavn residence. The relation between the two does not appear to have been close; Brammer's Dagbøger (preserved at Trinitatis Sognekontor) contain a single reference to Notabene, on the occasion of the wife's departure in August 1846: "Etatsraadens Hustru Notabene har forladt ham. Hun er en stille Kone og dette er, saavidt jeg veed, hendes første utilbørlige Handling." ("Etatsraad Notabene's wife has left him. She is a quiet woman and this is, so far as I know, her first improper action.") The entry's reference to Notabene as Etatsraad is in error; Notabene held no civil rank above Cand. theol., and Brammer was evidently mistaken or imprecise.

The maid (Margarethe Pedersdatter, ca. 1812 – ca. 1880), who served in the Christianshavn household from 1838 to 1846 and recovered the three singed leaves of the burnt Indlednings-Paragrapher on the morning of 17 March 1843. Her recovery of the leaves is the only evidence we possess that the burnt manuscript was, in part, a substantive composition of more than thirty pages. She did not, by Notabene's own account, ever tell her mistress of the recovery. She left the household at the wife's instruction in the autumn of 1846 and is not known to have written to Notabene thereafter; her later movements are not documented.

Sagsøgerindens Skilsmissebrev af 28. August 1846

Forwarded by PROCURATOR F. LINDAHL, Frederiksberggade, Kjøbenhavn, on behalf of the Plaintiff, the wife of the addressee, hereby suppressed in her own name as is her custom and as has been her practice throughout the marriage now sought to be dissolved.

Reproduced in the original Danish from Sagaktiv, Vor Frelser Sogn, Skilsmissesag no. 47 of 1846, fol. 4r–6v, with the English translation supplied by the present editor on the facing page.

Til Hr. Cand. theol. N. C. Bentzon, kaldet NICOLAUS NOTABENE, Christianshavn, denne 28de August 1846.

I de fjorten Aar, hvori Sagsøgerinden har været Deres Hustru, har hun, paa Grundlag af det Løfte, De ved Ægteskabets Indgaaelse afgav, oppebaaret med Taalmod en vedvarende Krænkelse, hvis Karakter De vil paa Sagsøgerindens Vegne tillade hendes Broder, Hr. Procurator Lindahl, i Korthed at fremstille.

De forpligtede Dem, ved Ægteskabet i Vor Frue Sogn den 24de Juni 1830, til ikke at lade trykke nogen Bog under noget Navn, hverken eget eller andet, hverken paa egen Bekostning eller for andres Regning, hverken i Kongeriget eller udenfor det, saa længe Sagsøgerinden var Deres Hustru. Sagsøgerinden tog dette Løfte til Indtægt, anseende det for den Beskyttelse af Hjemmets Fred, hvortil hun, som Hustru, var berettiget. Hun maatte i øvrigt udfra Deres Karakter forvente, at De vilde betragte Løftet som et Hjertets Forpligtelse, og ikke alene som en bogstavelig.

I de første tretten Aar af Ægteskabet søgte De, til Trods for Løftet, at frembringe Bøger, hvilke Sagsøgerinden ved adskillige Lejligheder maatte tage i Forvaring eller, i en enkelt sørgelig Anledning, lade fortære i Parlørens Ild. Disse Forsøg, hvor lidet hæderlige de end vare, anerkjender Sagsøgerinden dog for at have været aabne Brud paa Løftet, der bleve indrømmede og forsonede saa godt som Omstændighederne tillod.

Siden Foraaret 1843 har De imidlertid fremført en Form for vedvarende Krænkelse, som ikke kan beskrives uden ved Brug af stærke Udtryk. De har, hævdes det, holdt Dem til Bogstaven af Løftet — De har ikke ladet trykke nogen Bog under eget Navn som dets Forfatter — men De har, under Skikkelse af Forord, Udgaver, Tale, Prædikener, Hefter, Productioner, Smaastykker, og Anden hvad det maatte være, ladet trykke saa mange Sider, at den Skjelnen mellem Forord og Bog, hvorpaa De Deres Krænkelse baserede, har vist sig at være en blot Talegestus af det groveste Slags.

Sagsøgerinden har, i August 1846, ved Tilfældets Hjælp opdaget Beviset for denne vedvarende Krænkelse — i Form af en Subscriptions-Indbydelse paa Andet Bind af et af de Værker, De gjennem flere Aar har frembragt under den Skikkelse, jeg har beskrevet. Hun forstod da, at den Krænkelse, hun i den nys forløbne Tid havde anet, og som hun havde ladet hvile paa et fornuftigt Tvivlsom, var Realitet og af en Omfangsrigdom, hun ikke havde tilstrækkelig Anelse om.

Sagsøgerinden anlægger derfor herved Sag om Ægteskabsskilsmisse paa Grundlag af vedvarende Utroskab ved Forfatterskab, idet hun lader sin Broder, Hr. Procurator Lindahl, paa sine Vegne forfølge Sagen ad rettens Vej til endelig Afslutning. Sagsøgerinden anmoder Dem om ikke at modarbejde Sagens Gang, idet De jo, paa Grundlag af Deres egne Skriverier, til Fulde maa vedkende Dem den Krænkelse, hvorpaa Sagsøgerinden bygger sit Krav.

Sagsøgerinden afslutter med en personlig Bemærkning, som hendes Broder, Hr. Procurator Lindahl, har advaret hende imod at indfløje, men som hun har valgt at vedlægge mod hans Raad: at De, i de fjorten Aar af Deres Forfatterskab som er forløbet siden Sagsøgerinden første Gang advarede Dem mod det, ikke een Gang har gjort hende den Ære at spørge hende, hvorvidt hun ønskede at læse, hvad De havde skrevet.

Sagsøgerinden underskriver ikke, idet hun aldrig har givet sit Navn til at staae i nogen Bog eller paa noget Papir, der senere kunde komme i en Bogs Nærhed. Hendes Broder underskriver for hende, paa hendes Vegne og med hendes Befuldmægtigelse.

Frederik Lindahl, Procurator paa Sagsøgerindens Vegne

English translation, supplied by the present editor.

To Hr. Cand. theol. N. C. Bentzon, called NICOLAUS NOTABENE, Christianshavn, this 28th day of August 1846.

In the fourteen years during which the Plaintiff has been your wife, she has, on the basis of the pledge you gave at the contracting of the marriage, borne with patience a continuous injury, the character of which you will permit her brother, Hr. Procurator Lindahl, to set forth in summary on the Plaintiff's behalf.

You undertook, at the marriage in Vor Frue parish on the 24th day of June 1830, to permit no book to be printed under any name, whether your own or another's, whether at your own expense or for another's account, whether within the Kingdom or outside it, so long as the Plaintiff remained your wife. The Plaintiff accepted this pledge as the protection of domestic peace to which, as a wife, she was entitled. She had, moreover, every right to expect from your character that you would regard the pledge as an obligation of the heart and not merely of the letter.

During the first thirteen years of the marriage, you sought, notwithstanding the pledge, to produce books, which the Plaintiff was required on several occasions to take into safekeeping or, on one unhappy occasion, to consign to the fire of the parlour. These attempts, however unbecoming they were, the Plaintiff nevertheless acknowledges as open breaches of the pledge, which were admitted and reconciled so far as the circumstances permitted.

Since the spring of 1843, however, you have practised a form of continuous injury which cannot be described without recourse to strong expressions. You have, it is maintained, adhered to the letter of the pledge — you have not permitted any book to be printed under your own name as its author — but you have, under the appearance of Prefaces, Editions, Address, Sermons, Issues, Productions, Pieces, and whatever else it may have been, permitted to be printed so many pages that the distinction between a preface and a book on which your injury was based has shown itself to be a mere figure of speech of the grossest sort.

The Plaintiff has, in August 1846, by chance discovered the proof of this continuous injury — in the form of a Subscription Notice for the second volume of one of the works which you have produced over several years under the appearance I have described. She understood then that the injury which she had during the recent period suspected, and which she had permitted to rest on a reasonable doubt, was real, and of an extent of which she had not had sufficient intimation.

The Plaintiff accordingly hereby institutes proceedings for the dissolution of the marriage on the grounds of persistent infidelity by means of authorship, allowing her brother, Hr. Procurator Lindahl, to prosecute the matter on her behalf through the courts to final conclusion. The Plaintiff asks you not to oppose the proceedings, inasmuch as on the basis of your own writings you must fully acknowledge the injury upon which the Plaintiff bases her claim.

The Plaintiff closes with a personal observation, which her brother Hr. Procurator Lindahl has advised her against inserting, but which she has chosen to attach against his advice: that in the fourteen years of your authorship that have elapsed since the Plaintiff first warned you against it, not on a single occasion have you done her the honour of asking her whether she wished to read what you had written.

The Plaintiff does not sign, having never given her name to stand in any book or upon any paper that might subsequently come into the vicinity of a book. Her brother signs for her, on her behalf and with her authorization.

Frederik Lindahl, Procurator on the Plaintiff's behalf

of 16 March 1843

The following fragmentary text is reproduced from the three singed leaves of the manuscript recovered, on the morning of 17 March 1843, by the maid Margarethe Pedersdatter and preserved by Notabene in a folder marked, in his own hand, "De brændte Indlednings-Paragrapher, foraaret 1843. Forsigtigt!" ("The burnt Introductory Paragraphs, spring 1843. With care!") The folder is preserved in the Notabene-arkivet, NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 5. Of the three leaves, leaf 1 is the most extensively preserved; leaf 2 is preserved chiefly in its upper third; leaf 3 survives only in fragments. The conjectural pagination is the present editor's; the original manuscript appears to have run to between thirty and thirty-four leaves, of which only these three were recovered. The work of which it formed the introduction has not been identified, although the Bibliography of Works Forbidden (§ V below) supplies a probable identification.

Legible passages are reproduced in roman type. Singed passages, of which only fragments are visible, are reproduced with the visible fragments in their position; the missing matter is indicated by square brackets enclosing ellipses, with the conjectural length of the missing matter indicated only where the leaf-edge permits.

[Leaf 1, recto:]

§ 1. INDLEDNING.

Det er en gammel Erfaring, at det Liv, hvori en Mand finder sig, ikke nødvendigvis er det, han med fri Sjel vilde have valgt sig, men det, [...] omstændigheder, hvorover han kun ringe Magt har, ham have tildelt. Naar imidlertid Manden i sit voksne Liv finder, at hans Stilling i Verden — det være sig som Embedsmand, som Ægtefælle, som Borger, eller som Forfatter — er bleven ham paatvunget af Magter, der ikke have spurgt ham om hans Mening, da er det hans Pligt at [...] paa een af to Maader: enten at [...]

[...]

§ 2. OM PARAGRAPHENS NØDVENDIGHED.

En Paragraph, der staar alene i en Bog, er en Modsigelse; en Bog, der staar alene uden Paragraph, er en anden. Det er imidlertid karakteristisk for vor Tid, at vi have begyndt at producere begge Slags Modsigelser i en saadan Mængde, [...]

[Leaf 1, verso:]

[...] saa at den Læser, der søger efter en sammenhængende Tankeudvikling, fra hvilken han skulde kunne hente Næring til sit eget Tænkende, finder kun Brokker, og kun saadanne Brokker, som han selv allerede har set i Speilet om Morgenen. Paragraphens Nødvendighed, som vi her skulle udvikle [...]

§ 3. OM FRYGTEN VED PARAGRAPHEN.

Naar en Mand sidder ned og skal skrive sin Paragraph, da hænder det undertiden, og det netop for de Mænd, hvis Sind er fyldest med Stof, at en Frygt griber ham. Frygten har ingen bestemt Genstand; den er ikke Frygt for at skrive det Forkerte, ikke Frygt for at skrive det Anstødelige, ikke Frygt for at skrive det Uvigtige. Den er Frygt for [...] og dog [...]

[Leaf 2, recto, upper third only:]

[...] denne Frygt skulle vi i de paafølgende Paragrapher behandle paa fire forskjellige Maader: psychologisk, æsthetisk, ethisk, og religiøst. Den psychologiske Behandling, hvormed vi her begynde, har ikke Frygtens Aarsag til Genstand — den Aarsag er ikke psychologisk — men dens Tilstand og dens Skikkelse [...]

[Leaf 3, fragments only:]

[...] hvori en saadan Mand finder sig, er Friheden. Frihedens [...] Svimmelhed [...]

[...] og denne Svimmelhed er den dybeste psychologiske Tilstand, [...]

[...] kun den, der har gennemløbet [...] er i Stand til [...]

The reader will perceive at once the relation between the foregoing fragments and the Smaastykker of 1847 (Vol. VII of the present edition), particularly §§ 9 (Svimmelhed) and 16 (Øieblik). The matter is treated at length in the apparatus to Vol. VII; the present editor records only that, on the evidence of the recovered fragments, the manuscript of March 1843 was a substantial introduction to a treatise on the concept of Frygt (Fear) or Angest (Anxiety), of which the Smaastykker preface of four years later represents Notabene's surviving condensed treatment. The matter's bearing on the longstanding scholarly debate concerning the relation between Notabene's Smaastykker and Vigilius Haufniensis's Begrebet Angest of June 1844 is discussed in the introduction to Vol. VII and in Vibskov's essay below.

A Bibliography of Works Forbidden

being a Reconstruction of the Manuscripts attempted by N. Notabene during the years 1832–1843, prior to the Forord compromise

The following bibliography reconstructs, so far as the surviving sources permit, the manuscripts which Notabene attempted, completed in draft, or abandoned in the course of the first thirteen years of his marriage. None of these manuscripts was published; most were destroyed (either at his wife's hand, by his own hand in compliance with her injunction, or by inadvertent loss); two survive in fragmentary form. The bibliography is reconstructed from: (a) Notabene's own diary entries in NKS 4° 3204, fascicles 1–2; (b) his correspondence with his aunt Vibeke Bentzon, in the same archive; (c) references in his post-1844 published works, particularly the Forord itself; (d) the singed leaves recovered by the maid in March 1843 (see § IV above); and (e) such inferences as the surviving materials permit. The bibliography is arranged chronologically by Notabene's working start-date; the entries follow the conventions of the Forskningscentret's Bibliographia Kierkegaardiana (1996), adapted for Notabene's authorship.

1832. Om Forholdet mellem Tro og Lære. Et Forsøg. (On the Relation between Faith and Doctrine. An Attempt.) Notabene's first sustained attempt at independent authorship, undertaken in the summer following his marriage. A treatise of approximately 240 manuscript pages in the projected complete form; some 80 pages drafted before the project was discovered by his wife and the manuscript taken into safekeeping. Notabene's diary records the loss of the manuscript on 14 November 1832 (NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 1, fol. 27r) but does not specify what subsequently became of the eighty drafted pages; they have not been recovered. The work would have addressed the relation of the speculative philosophy of the day to the established Lutheran doctrine; the diary contains some twenty pages of preparatory notes, on the basis of which Vibskov (1958, pp. 78–84) reconstructs the work's probable argument.

1833. Bidrag til en Mathematik for de Følende. (Contributions to a Mathematics for those of Feeling Temperament.) An unusual project — a pastiche of contemporary mathematical primers, intended as a satire on the systematization of feeling in the speculative aesthetic of the period. Notabene's diary records the project's commencement in February 1833 (fasc. 1, fol. 31r) and its abandonment in May of the same year, on the grounds that "the figures I have wished to present cannot be communicated by figures, and the writing of them in words has occupied more time than the matter justifies" (fol. 39v). No manuscript survives.

1834, spring. Det philosophiske Brevsystem. (The Philosophical Letter-System.) Twenty-four philosophical letters in the form of correspondence between two friends. Six letters drafted; the project was abandoned in September 1834 after the wife's discovery of letters 3 and 5 in Notabene's writing-desk. The wife is recorded, in the diary, to have read both letters carefully and to have returned them with the observation that "what you have written to your friend you might have written to me, and you have not done so; for what reason I cannot determine, but I shall determine it in time" (fol. 51r). Notabene's response was to abandon the project; the drafted letters were destroyed by him on 1 October 1834.

1835–1836. Den schellingianske Naturphilosophie i sin danske Form. (The Schellingian Natural Philosophy in its Danish Form.) A substantial scholarly treatise, of which the first three chapters were drafted between October 1835 and August 1836. The manuscript, of approximately 140 pages, was confiscated by the wife in September 1836 and converted by her to hair-papers (the small twisted papers used to set curls in the period), in which form it served the household for some six months. Notabene's diary records the loss with a single sentence: "Hun krøller med Schelling." ("She curls with Schelling.") (fasc. 2, fol. 4v.) No fragments are known to survive.

1837. Sjelens Anatomie. Et Bidrag. (The Anatomy of the Soul. A Contribution.) A psychological-philosophical treatise of approximately 60 pages drafted between January and April 1837, on the relation between the inner movements of feeling and the determinations of speculative philosophy. The manuscript was abandoned by Notabene of his own accord in May 1837, the diary entry reading: "Sjelens Anatomie kan ikke skrives med Pen og Blæk; det er en gammel Visdom som jeg har glemt." ("The anatomy of the soul cannot be written with pen and ink; it is an old wisdom which I have forgotten.") (fasc. 2, fol. 8r.) The manuscript was destroyed by Notabene.

1838. En Hverdags-Komedie. Skuespil i tre Acter. (An Everyday Comedy. A Play in Three Acts.) Notabene's single attempt at dramatic composition; an evident response to the success of Fru Gyllembourg's Hverdags-Historier in the literary market of the late 1830s. The play, of which Notabene drafted Acts I and II in their entirety and Act III in outline, depicted a household in which a husband attempted to write a play while his wife was at her embroidery in the next room. The manuscript was discovered by the wife on 6 August 1838; she read Act I in Notabene's presence, set it aside, and observed only that "the figure of the wife is recognisable, and the figure of the husband is not; if you wish to finish the play you may do so, but I shall not appear in any subsequent draft." Notabene abandoned the play on the spot. The manuscript was retained by Notabene's wife and is not known to survive.

1839–1841. Bemærkninger ved Læsningen af Hegel. (Remarks Occasioned by the Reading of Hegel.) An extended series of marginal commentaries on Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, the Phänomenologie des Geistes, and the Enzyklopädie, transcribed by Notabene from his own marginalia in three of his aunt Vibeke's copies of the German works (the copies preserved at Frederiksværk and now in the Notabene-arkivet, NKS 4° 3204, fasc. 6). Notabene's project was to expand the marginalia into a continuous critical commentary; the project occupied him from autumn 1839 to spring 1841 but was abandoned upon his discovery that, in his aunt's view, "the marginalia in the margins are the better book; if you write the continuous commentary, you will have to leave the marginalia behind, and they are what is worth keeping" (letter of Vibeke Bentzon to Notabene, 14 April 1841; fasc. 4, fol. 16r). Notabene accepted the judgement and abandoned the project. The marginalia survive in the three volumes; they form the basis of the matter elaborated in the Smaastykker of 1847, particularly § 5 (on Mediation).

1842, spring. Om Smerten. Et Forsøg. (On Suffering. An Attempt.) A treatise on the concept of suffering as the principle of inwardness and of knowledge; some 90 pages drafted in the spring of 1842. The manuscript was, in this case, neither confiscated by the wife nor destroyed by Notabene; it was lost. Notabene's diary entry of 18 June 1842 records the loss with unusual emphasis: "Om Smerten er forsvundet. Den var paa Skriverbordet om Morgenen; om Aftenen er den ikke at finde. Jeg har søgt overalt. Hun siger, at hun ikke har taget den; jeg tror hende; og dog er den væk." ("On Suffering has disappeared. It was on the writing-desk in the morning; in the evening it cannot be found. I have searched everywhere. She says that she has not taken it; I believe her; and yet it is gone.") (fasc. 2, fol. 22r.) The substance of the lost treatise survives only in its echo in the Smaastykker of 1847, particularly § 10 (on Suffering as the Principle of Knowledge).

1843, March. Indlednings-Paragrapher til en philosophisk Antropologi. (Introductory Paragraphs to a Philosophical Anthropology.) The burnt manuscript of 16 March 1843, of which three singed leaves survive (see § IV above). The work, on the evidence of the surviving fragments, was an introduction to a substantial treatise on the concept of Frygt or Angest. It is the only one of the works listed in the present bibliography to survive in any substantive fragmentary form. The work occasioned the Forord compromise of May 1843; the compromise made possible the Forord of 1844 and the eight phantom volumes of 1844–47; the eight phantom volumes are accordingly, in a sense, the form which the burnt manuscript was permitted, by compromise, eventually to take.