Bognadoff boys enchanted France, but academics had mixed feelings

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff were descended from European royalty – and were clearly bright – but many academics had doubts about them.

Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff pose during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival in Cannes. Picture: AFP

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff

Academics, television stars.

Born Saint-Lary, France, August 29, 1949; died Paris, December 28 (Grichka) and January 3 (Igor), aged 72.

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In 1976, twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff decided to write a book about science fiction – space, astronomy and the big bang fascinated them. Their childhood years had been unusual and they thereafter took an odd approach to their lives, invariably in tandem.

The Keys to Science Fiction would examine the genre, and the boys set out to speak to notable Europeans and people in the street reckoning that everyone had a view. They wrote first to Pope Paul VI and Baudouin, the king of the Belgians. Both responded, which spurred the boys on, and the book was published that year.

It was well received and soon the brothers were dressed like Star Trek extras and presenting science shows and science fiction series on French television, including The Twilight Zone, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. They were witty and amusing, and they became stars and sex symbols.

They had complicated ancestry. Their Swiss mother, known as Maya, was the child of noted black American singer and composer Roland Hayes, the son of a slave, and Countess Bertha Kolowrat-Krakowska. The countess, who was married to Bohemian count Hieronymus Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Hayes started an affair in 1924 and the following year Bertha became pregnant, giving birth to Maya early in 1926.

For whatever reason, when Maya married Russian painter Yuri Bogdanoff and had Igor and Grichka, it was Bertha who reared them. Her relationship with Hayes was long over by then but the boys did meet their famous grandfather once in Paris in 1955.

They grew up in a French chalet in the Pyrenees near the border with Spain that Bertha’s husband purchased for her after they separated. There, surrounded by 15,000 books, the boys – who spoke German at home – learnt French, Russian and English and explored their interest in maths, science and astronomy.

After high school they moved to Paris, but little is known of their early years there. Following their book’s success the boys were interviewed on French TV, coming to the attention of a producer of youth programming who, early in 1979, approached them to host a series he was launching called Temps X (Time X), a mix of real science, science fiction and pop culture. The show was a hit and quickly went from monthly to weekly and from 30 minutes to an hour. The brothers presented the show in matching shiny jumpsuits from what appeared to be a spaceship flight deck.

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff suited up for TV in France. Picture: Getty Images

Everyone in France knew the twins. Their fame spread farther afield when their theses in support of PhDs from the University of Burgundy – Grichka in maths, Igor in theoretical physics – were ridiculed by academics around the world. The attacks on the papers were put online by University of California mathematical physicist John Baez (his cousin is folk singer Joan Baez) and included one professor’s claim that they were “delightfully meaningless” spoofs assembled with “theoretical-physics jargon and combinations of buzzwords … which apparently have been taken seriously”.

It turns out he hadn’t read them, but others had and the attacks were at first relentless.

Under the headline “Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers”, The New York Times reported that scientists “have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense”. Not everyone was so certain it was all a hoax. Some saw strokes of genius. The professor who approved Igor’s paper reckoned it was intriguing, if speculative. Perhaps it was just the vagueness of theoretical physics.

The Bognadoffs issued proceedings for defamation and copyright infringements – the first of several legal stoushes – but these mostly went nowhere. Both were announced as professors at Belgrade’s Megatrend University, whose claims to fame include awarding Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi an honorary doctorate in 2007 and former student Marija Serifovic winning the Eurovision Song Contest that year.

Meanwhile, the Bognadoffs’ appearance was rapidly changing: in what appeared to be a series of extreme procedures their faces were cartoonishly distorted, growing wider and longer while their cheekbones inflated and their lips puffed up. They denied having any cosmetic surgery.

Igor married twice and had six children. Grichka was never known to have had a relationship.

They each fell ill on December 15 with Covid-19 – reportedly neither was vaccinated – and died six days apart at the same Paris hospital.