OTHER FAMOUS BORIS'S

Boris Becker (1967- ), German tennis player, born in Leiman, West Germany (now part of the Federal Republic of Germany). Becker began training as a tennis player at the age of three and began competing in tournaments at age nine. He turned professional in 1984. An aggressive power player noted for his smashing serve, Becker rose within two years to second in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings. He won the championship at Wimbledon in 1985 to become the youngest men's singles champion since 1891, and the first unseeded player as well as the first West German to take that title. Considered a national hero, he successfully defended his title at Wimbledon in 1986 and finished the year by winning 21 consecutive matches. In subsequent years Becker remained at or near the top of the professional rankings. In 1989 he won both the United States Open and Wimbledon crowns, and he led West Germany to Davis Cup Championships in 1988 and 1989. In 1991, a year in which he twice gained and twice lost the top ranking, Becker won his first Australian Open. He won the men's doubles at the 1992 Olympic Games with partner Michael Stich. In January 1996, Becker won his first grand slam final in five years by defeating the American player Michael Chang in the final of the Australian Open, but the following year announced his retirement from major tournaments.

Boris Christoff, (1914-1993), Bulgarian bass, whose fine voice and theatrical talent led to his being acclaimed as one of the foremost operatic performers of his generation. Born in Plovdiv, Christoff initially studied as a lawyer, but in 1941 King Boris of Bulgaria provided money for him to study singing, having heard Christoff perform with the Gusla Choir. Christoff studied first with Riccardo Stracciari in Rome, then moved to Salzburg to work under Muratti. He made his operatic debut in 1946 as Colline (in La Bohème by Puccini) at Reggio Calabria, Italy. In the subsequent season he appeared at Rome and La Scala, Milan, performing the role of Pimen in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Then in 1949 he performed the role of Boris for the first time, at Covent Garden in London; Boris was a role with which Christoff became closely associated, singing it worldwide more than 600 times in many principal opera houses, and recording it twice. Throughout his career Christoff was considered to be an excellent performer in Russian opera, in which his combined vocal and theatrical talents were well displayed. However, critics also acclaimed his performances in Italian and German opera—he sang most of the principal bass parts of Verdi’s operas, winning considerable praise for his portrayal of Philip II in Don Carlos, and roles from Handel and Wagner. Christoff was also a distinguished song recitalist, and made recordings of Russian songs by composers such as Borodin, Glinka, and Mussorgsky.

Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, (c. 1551-1605), Tsar of Russia (1598-1605), who increased the power of the Russian monarchy and Church and imposed serfdom on the peasants. A descendant of an old Tatar family, Boris became a favourite of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible), and his influence on the imperial court was further strengthened by his sister's marriage to Fyodor Ivanovich, the mentally weak son of Ivan. In 1584, on his deathbed, Ivan appointed Boris and Nikita Romanovich Yuriev joint guardians and regents for Fyodor, who became nominal tsar as Fyodor I Ivanovich. Soon sole regent on the death of Nikita, Boris became the most powerful man in Russia, recognized as head of the state. He recolonized Siberia and gave the Church of Russia a status equal to that of other Eastern Churches by making Moscow a patriarchate. Extremely autocratic, he was the first Russian ruler to use Siberia as a place of banishment for political exiles; moreover, he legalized serfdom in the grimmest form by an edict of 1587, which forbade the transfer of serfs from one landowner to another and thus bound them to the land. He may also have brought about the death of Dmitri, Ivan's youngest son, in whose name many nobles had unsuccessfully revolted in 1584. On Tsar Fyodor's death in 1598, the Zemsky Sobor (National Assembly) elected Boris as his successor. The new tsar banished the Romanovs, his chief rivals, and proceeded to further policies he had already begun, such as strengthening Russian commerce, introducing various aspects of Western civilization, and struggling against the privileged nobility. Despite his power, Boris was exceedingly suspicious and felt himself insecure; informers kept him constantly advised of all political activities, and increasing numbers of Russians became the victims of his persecutions. In 1604 a pretender to the throne, who claimed to be the murdered Dmitri, appeared in Poland; the pretender gained thousands of supporters and led a revolt against Boris. The tsar, however, died suddenly in the midst of the civil war on April 23, 1605. The story of Boris Godunov became the basis of the tragedy Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin, and was later made into an opera by Modest Mussorgsky.

Boris Blacher (1903-1975), German composer. Blacher was born in Niuzhuang, China, the son of a German-Baltic family. He lived in Berlin from 1922, where he first studied physics, mathematics, and architecture before deciding on a musical career. After studying composition and musicology under F. E. Koch, he worked at the Dresden Conservatoire from 1938 as a composition teacher. Blacher, whose music was seen as "degenerate" by the Nazis, started a lectureship in composition at the International Institute of Music in Berlin in 1945. From 1949 he worked at the West Berlin Hochschule for Music and Performing Arts, which he directed from 1953 to 1970. At the same time as fulfilling these administrative posts he composed numerous works, including concertos for piano and violin, operas, oratorios, chamber music (string quartets and other works), songs, ballets, and a symphony. Among his most important pieces are the orchestral Concertante Musik (1937), the Paganini Variations (1947, for orchestra), and the Clementi Variations (1961, for piano and orchestra). Blacher was awarded the Hamburg Bach Prize, the Berlin Arts Prize, and the Grossen Kunstpreis of North-Rhine Westphalia for his achievements.

Boris I (died 907), khan of Bulgaria (852-889). During his reign Boris conducted unsuccessful campaigns against Serbia and Croatia. Under pressure from Byzantine Emperor Michael III, Boris embraced Christianity in 865 and made it the official religion. In 870, after wavering between adherence to the Western and Eastern Churches, Boris decided on the latter when the pope failed to meet his demand for the appointment of an archbishop for Bulgaria. In 889 Boris voluntarily relinquished the throne in favour of his son Vladimir, and retired to a monastery. Vladimir, however, proved to be an incompetent and vicious monarch, and the nobility revolted against him in 893. Emerging from retirement, Boris deposed and blinded Vladimir and replaced him with Simeon, Boris's younger son. Boris then re-entered the monastery. He is venerated as a saint by the Eastern Church.

Boris III (1894-1943), king of Bulgaria (1918-1943), born in Sofiya, eldest son of King Ferdinand I. Boris became king when his father abdicated in 1918. Ruling for 15 years as a constitutional monarch, he took little part in politics in spite of constant internal disturbances. In 1934 the Bulgarian premier suspended the constitution and set up a military dictatorship. The following year Boris took over, ruling thereafter as a dictator. During World War II he allied Bulgaria with the Axis Powers and agreed to German occupation. He furnished troops for operations against Greece and Yugoslavia but refused to attack the USSR. Boris was reportedly assassinated by German agents.

Boris Karloff (1887-1969), British actor, permanently identified with the creature created by Frankenstein and the golden age of Hollywood horror. Born William Henry Pratt in London and educated at the city university with a view to following his father into the diplomatic corps, Karloff instead chose a career farming in Canada, which he soon swopped for acting. For years Karloff toured with travelling companies and while in Los Angeles played a bit-part in His Majesty the American (1919). He worked steadily and unspectacularly throughout the rest of the silent period, escaping attention until he played the trusty convict who turns killer in The Criminal Code (1931). Frankenstein (1931) was a film intended for Bela Lugosi as a follow-up to Dracula, but the latter's feuding with Universal led to them casting Karloff instead. Karloff was pathetic rather than frightening as the monster, but displayed all his considerable skills in the role that, along with others, proved him a master of this genre. The Mummy, The Old Dark House, and The Mask of Fu Manchu (all 1932) are all examples. As the vogue for horror waned, he played supporting parts and leads in B-movies. He received top billing in an A-picture only once again, in The Climax (1944), which Universal hoped would repeat the success of Claude Rains in the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera. Karloff's later films were often unexceptional and low-budget, whether American, British, or Spanish, with the exception of Bogdanovich's Targets (1968), in which Karloff plays a horror film star, a thinly disguised portrait of himself.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), Soviet poet and author, who was one of the foremost literary figures in the USSR. Pasternak was born February 10, 1890, into a cultivated Jewish family in Moscow and was educated at the universities of Moscow and of Marburg, Germany. He studied music during his youth but later turned to writing poetry. His first collection of poems was The Twin in the Clouds (1914). It was followed by other collections, including Over the Barriers (1917; trans. 1923), My Sister, Life (1922), and Second Birth (1932). Although the influence of the late 19th-century Symbolist tradition, with its emphasis on mysticism, aesthetics, and impressionism, is evident in his work, the poems reveal strong modernistic tendencies, particularly in unusual associations of images and in a philosophical approach to nature and history. These works established Pasternak as an outstanding Soviet poet. Communist critics, however, reproached him because his poetry did not follow the preferred patterns of Socialist Realism, and after 1932 only two collections, On Early Trains (1943) and The Terrestrial Expanse (1945), were published. He earned his living from his notable translations of the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other English and German writers. Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago (completed in 1956; trans. 1958), was rejected by Soviet publishers because of its critical approach to Soviet communism, but it won international acclaim when it first appeared in the West in 1957. It was translated into 18 languages. The novel is a story of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love, and presents a panoramic view of Russian society at the time of the 1917 Revolution. The protagonist, Dr. Zhivago, is an intellectual whose sincerity, religious convictions, and independence of spirit enter into conflict with the theory and practice of the Soviet regime. Pasternak won and accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature but was denounced by various Soviet Communist groups as a traitor. Announcing publicly his unwillingness to enter exile, he rejected the prize. He died May 30, 1960, near Moscow. Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the USSR in 1987 when, due to a newly initiated "openness" (in Russian, glasnost) policy by the party leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Pasternak was officially rehabilitated. Among his other works are the collection of short stories Airy Paths (1925), the autobiographies Safe Conduct (1931; trans. 1958) and I Remember (1957; trans. 1959), and the unfinished play The Blind Beauty (1969; trans. 1969).

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931- ), Russian politician, who became the first popularly elected President of Russia in 1991. Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and trained as a building engineer, Yeltsin became a Communist Party member in 1961. He was brought to Moscow by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and installed as First Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee in 1985. A strong supporter of glasnost and perestroika, he quickly alienated party reactionaries and, with Gorbachev’s acquiescence, he was stripped of his post in 1987. Critical of both Gorbachev and the party, Yeltsin gained a wide following during the late 1980s, and in June 1991 he was elected President of Russia. When reactionaries moved to depose Gorbachev in August, Yeltsin led the fight to resist the coup and dismantle the party apparatus, staging a heroic stand at the Russian parliament, the White House, in Moscow. He used the crisis to seize the political initiative from Gorbachev. He subsequently directed efforts to replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the more loosely constituted Commonwealth of Independent States that was established in December 1991. Gorbachev’s resignation as Soviet President confirmed Yeltsin as the dominant figure in the former Soviet republics. In January 1992 Yeltsin met with other world leaders at the United Nations (UN) to determine the future of the UN Security Council. He urged arms control and Western investment in Russia. Beginning in 1992, the conflict between Yeltsin and his political opponents intensified. Yeltsin suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the Russian Constitutional Court, chaired by Valeriy Zorkin. The court overturned Yeltsin’s decree creating a Russian Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs, and lifted portions of Yeltsin’s ban on the Soviet Communist Party. In 1993 the court repealed his ban on the National Salvation Front, a Communist-nationalist organization that had called for Yeltsin’s removal. Yeltsin also lost the struggle to have his candidate, Yegor Gaidar, appointed as Prime Minister. Gaidar, who had been acting Prime Minister, was replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin at a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies at the end of 1992. In 1993 Yeltsin announced on television that he had issued a decree declaring special presidential rule, but when the decree was published there was no mention of special presidential powers. Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoy sharply criticized Yeltsin for issuing the decree and for using a referendum to gain popular approval of reform policies. Yeltsin asked Rutskoy to resign as Vice-President, and when Rutskoy refused, Yeltsin removed Rutskoy’s powers of office, despite protests by Zorkin and the Supreme Soviet, the then Russian legislature. Yeltsin won the support of the majority of Russian voters who participated in the April 1993 referendum, but the referendum did little to end his power struggle with parliament. In September, Yeltsin attempted to break the power deadlock by dissolving parliament and calling for new parliamentary elections. In turn, parliament voted to impeach Yeltsin, and swore in Rutskoy as acting President. Led by Rutskoy and parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, hundreds of legislators and anti-Yeltsin demonstrators occupied the parliament building in Moscow. On September 28, Yeltsin ordered troops to barricade the parliament building, and in the following week security forces, acting in support of Yeltsin, clashed with pro-parliamentary demonstrators, who were mainly hardline Communists and nationalists. On October 4, Rutskoy and Khasbulatov surrendered after the parliament building was stormed. In February 1994 they were granted amnesty by the lower house of parliament, despite Yeltsin’s opposition. In spite of his political struggles at home, Yeltsin took several trips abroad as President. In 1992 he addressed a joint session of the United States Congress in Washington, D.C., and declared an end to Soviet-era deception in international relations. In 1993 Yeltsin met with newly elected US President Bill Clinton in Canada to discuss financial and military matters. Clinton pledged to increase the amount of financial assistance to Russia at the meeting. The dispute between Russia and Japan over the four southernmost Kuril Islands continued in 1993, as the Japanese government made economic aid conditional on return of the islands. Recurrent illness led to Yeltsin’s hospitalization in July 1995 after a mild heart attack. Following the outbreak of secessionist violence in the region of Chechenya, Communist deputies attempted to impeach him the same month, but failed by a wide margin. Defending his presidential post in the 1996 elections, Yeltsin scored a narrow victory over the Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov in the first round of polling in June, then won a renewed mandate in the second round of polling in July after co-opting the third-placed candidate, General Aleksandr Lebed, into his administration. Yeltsin reappointed Chernomyrdin as his Prime Minister, and in October 1996 dismissed Lebed. In November, Yeltsin underwent heart surgery, leaving Chernomyrdin as acting premier for just under 24 hours during the operation. Returning to work in December, he was again ill in January 1997, and an attempt was made in the State Duma (Russia’s parliament) to impeach him. In March 1997, criticizing policy stagnation and government incompetence, he appointed a new reformist administration under the young politicians Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, retaining Chernomyrdin as a figurehead. Meeting President Clinton at a summit in Helsinki that month, he protested at planned expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include former Warsaw Pact countries, but promised to work to minimize resulting tensions. In April he signed an agreement integrating Russia with Belarus, despite concerns at the former Soviet republic’s economic and human rights records. Following further health scares, Yeltsin asserted his authority by sacking the entire Cabinet in March 1998. Despite initial Duma opposition, Chernomyrdin was replaced by Sergei Kirienko.

Vian, Boris (1920-1959), French novelist and dramatist, who was also a poet, jazz musician, engineer, and translator. Born near Paris, his original ambition was to be an engineer and he sat for the École Centrale at Lycée Condorcet. A great admirer of Alfred Jarry, he made enthusiastic use of his Pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions", a humorous revolt against positivist philosophy. As a novelist he wrote under pseudonyms, notably that of Vernon Sullivan. Under this name Vian wrote a thriller in the American style, J'irai crache sur vos tombes (1946). His masterpieces are L'écume des jours (1947; Froth on the Daydream, 1988), a heart-wrenching love story which is still avidly read today, and L'Arrache-Coeur (1953; Heartsnatcher, 1990). His plays, which are valuable contributions to the Theatre of the Absurd, present disjointed dialogues and incomprehensible behaviour, and expose the absurd nature of human existence: L'équarrissage pour tous, first performed in 1950, is a black comedy which takes place in a slaughterhouse in 1944, while Les Bâtisseurs d'empire (The Empire Builders, first performed in 1959) is a kind of burlesque tragedy where a family is slowly driven upstairs in its own house by a weird, silent figure, the Schmürz. Vian died of a heart attack aged 39.