Mikhail Barshchevsky told why write a letter to his mistress

Women’s happiness is an abstract, relative concept, and even Albert Einstein’s theory cannot measure it. But there was a man who is ready to specifically answer this question and, possibly, give good advice. This is the famous lawyer Mikhail Barshchevsky, who wrote a play called “Women’s Happiness.”

At times of geopolitical upheavals and total loneliness of the inhabitants of megacities – the discussion about women’s happiness is the very thing. About what women’s happiness is and how it differs from men’s, how professional activity helps to figure it out, the MK columnist spoke with Mikhail Barshchevsky.

I must say that the lawyer is not new to literature: he writes stories, three of his plays have been staged in theaters in Moscow and the country. The plot of one of the stories with a sad, and, I would say, hopelessly philosophical title “Not Fate” formed the basis of a new play, the title of which inspires, if not optimism, then a desire to deal with such a difficult issue as happiness, and even female.

– Mikhail Yuryevich, what is the difference between women and men, if at all you can find a difference in the state that everyone wants to experience, regardless of gender?

– Of course it’s different. First, women are more likely to feel happy than men. They generally live in illusions. And a smart man cannot be happy, and if he says, “I am happy,” he is not smart.

And the second consideration: when you have achieved everything in life, you have a beloved wife, children, but … What to do when children grow up, there is a generational conflict, a disassembly of fathers and children? Where then to look for this happiness? Now my youngest child is now 12 years old, and I have his teenage years – can this be considered happiness?

– But in your main profession you deal more with the negative side of life, and people come to you for help from trouble. And you wrote about women’s happiness or the search for it. Is this a way to get away from negativity?

– It seems to me that when a person sits down to write something, he subconsciously writes about what he personally would like in life, or writes about what should not be in his life, that is, he argues with a phantom, with his fears . You choose a story because you have a relationship with it.

You are right, more people come to me with negativity. And what is more in our life – negative or positive? We are always fighting with something or for something. And when you fight, you are afraid of negativity, and you try your best to avoid it. So, while working on the play, I didn’t have to leave my familiar world.

– Studying (including thanks to your work) men and women, are you by any chance going to write a play “Male happiness” or “Male misfortune”?

– I don’t think I would take on such a play. A man, if he is a man, and not something in trousers, he is the creator of his own destiny. And if something in his life went wrong, something bad, this is not a misfortune, but his mistake. And the worst thing is if he begins to blame others for this, and not himself.

A woman is more dependent, culturally, if you like, dependent on male influence. A man is the one who knows how to make decisions, who knows how to implement them and knows how to honestly say to himself: “Yes, I lost.”

But this does not mean that I only write about women. I have many stories about men too. I will tell you one story, and you will understand my attitude to this issue.

The events take place in the early nineties. The playwright, once famous, now sits at home penniless. He has a young beautiful wife, who all the time needs some kind of female joys, but he does not have the means for this. And now the oligarch invites him to his place and asks him to write a letter to his mistress. “You have a good pen,” says the rich man.

The playwright writes such a letter, saying, “Darling, I love you very much, but if I get divorced, as you demand, my shares will collapse, my partners will not forgive me, the whole business will collapse, and therefore I must stay in the family. But I want to be with you, so leave your husband, you will live alone, but on my full content … “.

For the work, the playwright receives a fee of two thousand dollars, returns home and finds that there is no wife or things in the house. It becomes clear that he wrote a letter to his own wife …

I note that Mikhail Barshchevsky himself is happy in his personal life: 47 years married to one wife Olga, he has three children and four grandchildren. And it is possible that personal experience can serve as a guarantee that there is more truth in his new play than fantasy.

Mikhail Barshchevsky said that the play was accepted for staging at the School of Modern Play theater, and director Maria Fedosova is already working on it. Interestingly, it turns out that the co-author (Ekaterina Kretova) and the director are women. It seems that even such a masculine man as Barshchevsky cannot understand women’s happiness without women.