Kjøbenhavn, Reitzel, 1844.
8vo. 100 pp. Completely uncut in the original printed brown wrappers with the text of the title-page repeated inside a frame to front board, printed author and title to spine, and the printing year within the same repeated frame to the back board. Lacking a bit of paper on the spine, but 2/3 of the original spineprinting preserved. Back wrapper lacking small piece of blank paper (ca. 2 x ½ cm). Light brownspotting to wrappers as well as leaves. An excellent copy, housed in a beautiful custom-made half morocco box with richly gilt spine in contemporary style. Gilt super ex-libris to front.
The first edition in the exceedingly scarce original printed wrappers of Kierkegaard's religious accompaniment to his seminal philosophical stage work (Stages on Life's Way), Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. As Stages on Life’s Way, Three Discourses... is divided into three sections: confession, marriage, and death – three crucial occasions in the life of each single individual. The three imagined discourses that constitute the present work – What It Means To Seek God, On the Occasion of a Confessional Service; Love Conquers All, On the Occasion of a Wedding; The Decisiveness of Death, At the Side of a Grave – deal with fundamental questions such as guilt, sin, forgiveness, marriage, and death. They all involve the anxiety of making a decision, a theme that is central in Kierkegaard’s philosophical as well as religious thought, placing these imagined discourses centrally in Kierkegaard’s “first” authorship. Himmelstrup 76. The present copy is no. 30 in Girsel's "Kierkegaard" (The Catalogue) which can be found here.
Order-nr.: 62265