INTERVIEW
"This book has been sleeping in me for a long time," smiled Macha Méril. His new book Vania, Vassia et la fille de Vassia is out on Thursday by Liana Lévi. Actress and author, she was, Monday, the cultural guest of Philippe Vandel on Europe 1. The occasion to evoke the story of Sonia, the main character of her novel, which resonates skillfully with hers.
"It's my literary find," she smiles. "I thought that instead of telling my own life, if I chose this character of Sonia, daughter of Cossacks - which is not at all the same thing as what I lived -, it would be a way to cross the century and put in the oven all the things that I have experienced myself. "
A story of Cossacks
"This is not a Russian novel, but a Cossack novel", specifies Macha Méril, born Maria-Magdalena Vladimirovna Gagarina and from a family of "white Russians" who emigrated and then naturalized French. The Cossacks are the horsemen of the Imperial Guard of Russia before 1917, before the revolution, before the civil war and the takeover of the Bolsheviks, who then drove them out of Russia. "There were communities all over France, especially in the factories in Paris," says Macha Méril. "In Boulogne-Billancourt and near Montargis for example, where they were 1,000 and had created a small Orthodox church," she continues.
Vania, Vassia and the daughter of Vassia , it is a saga which goes from 1939 to March 2019. A novel in which we meet Sacha Guitry, Joseph Kessel or Pierre Mendès France and which, especially, traces the history "of a silent immigration that does not speak of it ", explains Macha Méril.
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"A response to those who ask me what I have done with my life"
A hollow story from which all the same sketches its own story. In this novel, the three eponymous characters are looking for a future that reconciles them with their past as Cossacks. A future read by each of them from a different angle. Integrate in France with an exemplary career, maintain its Russian roots while ardently defending the French Republic, but also resume at all costs the fight against Stalin ... Three stories in one. And one, in particular, which curiously reminds that of Macha Méril herself.
We then see the character of Sonia discover the cinema of La Nouvelle Vague (50s and 60s), and in particular a film, A married woman , by Jean-Luc Godard. A film adored by the character and whose main actress is none other than Macha Méril.
"The young actress, dressed in Courrèges, short hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, is of Russian origin, all these gentlemen were around her, exhilarated to have seen her naked in the film", can we read in the 'work. A passage detailed by the author at the microphone of Europe 1. "It was during a projection at Matignon that had organized Pompidou (then president of the Republic, Editor's note), nobody had liked this film , except a few, "recalls Macha Méril. "It is the balance sheet of our time, of what we have experienced," she summarizes.
The actress, who will celebrate her 80th birthday this year, says she wanted to freely use everything she has accumulated. In memories, in experience, in lived. "This book is a bit like that," she concluded. "It is not a book: it is an answer to those who ask me what I have done with my life."