Since the 1950s, Kim Yaroshevskaya has had a career as a performer on stage as well as on the small and big screen. She has played Lorca, Pirandello, Camus, Beckett, Brecht, Ionesco — to name a few — and Chekhov on numerous occasions. She created texts by Quebec authors (Robert Gurik, Réjean Ducharme, Carole Fréchette) and the Acadian Antonine Maillet. In the cinema, we see her in 16 feature films. We owe him three works: Little Kim (Boreal, 1998), Tales of humor and wisdom (Rebel Planet, 2012) and My trip to America (Boreal, 2017).
Kim Yaroshevskaya has had a lasting impact on several generations and she is so intimately part of the great family and Quebec history that an effort of the imagination is necessary to imagine that she was born in Moscow on 1er October 1923, only six years after the Russian Revolution, it seems so distant in time and space.
In the documentary dedicated to him in 2003 by director Brigitte Nadeau, Kim recounts certain elements of his childhood in Stalinist Russia.
Intellectuals convinced of the virtues of the regime, her parents offered books to their only daughter who was too young to know how to read. For a long time, they raised him by refusing to give him a doll out of contempt for the stereotypes of North American education. They will give in to their deep desire when their daughter transforms the rifle they have just given her or the wooden spoon she plays with into a doll.
Shortly after, little Kim arrived in Montreal, with an aunt, at the age of 10, where her father sent her after the death of her mother. She only speaks Russian. It remains fabulous that the deprivation of a cherished toy was, through the meanders of creation or the unconscious, the driving force behind the constitution of a fictional character on which I will dwell and which will prove significant in the collective imagination of his adopted country.
Four years after it went on the air, Radio-Canada created The surprise box, a daily children’s show which gives birth to several more or less clownish characters. They first cohabit in the same show, and some will then have their own individual series. Among these, the Fanfreluche doll, present from the first season, in 1956.
A cheeky doll (the epithet is from Yaroshevskaya, in an interview), Fanfreluche tells, by reading them, legends and tales from various cultures. When a story displeases her, she physically enters the large book she is reading, to intervene and possibly change the scenario or the outcome, which sometimes puts her in perilous situations from which she generally emerges brilliantly.
Kim created this character and imagined the singularity of his relationship to the narration. She acts as a creator in her own right: she not only played this character, but designed it right down to her clothing, and imagined the stories. When Radio-Canada devoted a series of 46 episodes to it between 1968 and 1971, she signed the scenarios with the technical breakdown that each episode required.
The Société Radio-Canada had the good idea, in 2008, of producing DVD box sets of some of these shows. More than half a century after its creation, the series holds up solidly, both formally and in terms of content, despite the evolution of television technique, the way of scripting stories and the profound transformation of the values of Quebec society in recent decades. What other television series can do the same?
Fanfreluche/Yaroshevskaya looked at the stories in a way that was not only mischievous, but also showed a critical sense. She could take on ogres, like the woman-killer Bluebeard, and change the established order. She showed empathy and pity, was quick-witted, had an innate sense of justice, knew how to plead, had a heart for work when necessary, and was hedonistic ― she loved hickeys and liked to lounge in a large chair. The series and its author solicit the intelligence of young audiences by making them aware of their status as witnesses to a story.
It is difficult to realize to what extent this independent (she did not belong to anyone!) and thinking doll character was avant-garde and daring in Quebec in the 1950s. While intellectual adventure was so little valued for women, Fanfreluche loved reading. Many will entrust Mme Yaroshevskaya may have developed a taste for reading because of her, even though books were absent from their home.
It will come as no surprise that Fanfreluche saw his effigy officially part of the parade of giants for the Fête nationale du Québec in 2009. This shows the place this creation occupies in the collective imagination and in the hearts of Quebecers and of Quebecers.
From 1977, television allowed Kim to shine for 10 years in another cult series, becoming Grandma in Master key. Like her interpreter, the character she plays has aged, but retains the ability to touch young spectators.
This great actress will be 100 years old on the 1ster October 2023. The influence of this career is impressive — by its duration, but also by the quality of the relationship she has been able to establish with the public, with her peers and with the media. Kim Yaroshevskaya commands respect and arouses immense affection. This woman of heart and head will have instilled progressive values in the young years of television, with a slender character who knew how to impose herself in conventional stories to change their predictable outcome: what a formidable life lesson, and what a magnificent metaphor for the transformative power of art!
Thank you, Ms. Yaroshevskaya.