Asymptotics of characters of symmetric groups: Structure of Kerov character polynomials

We study asymptotics of characters of the symmetric groups on a fixed conjugacy class. It was proved by Kerov that such a character can be expressed as a polynomial in free cumulants of the Young diagram (certain functionals describing the shape of the Young diagram). We show that for each genus there exists a universal symmetric polynomial which gives the coefficients of the part of Kerov character polynomials with the prescribed homogeneous degree. The existence of such symmetric polynomials was conjectured by Lassalle.