EN
The paper is concerned with the best constants in the Bernstein and Markov inequalities on a compact set $E ⊂ ℂ^{N}$. We give some basic properties of these constants and we prove that two extremal-like functions defined in terms of the Bernstein constants are plurisubharmonic and very close to the Siciak extremal function $Φ_{E}$. Moreover, we show that one of these extremal-like functions is equal to $Φ_{E}$ if E is a nonpluripolar set with $lim_{n→∞} Mₙ(E)^{1/n} = 1$ where
$Mₙ(E) := sup{|| |grad P| ||_{E}/||P||_{E}}$,
the supremum is taken over all polynomials P of N variables of total degree at most n and $||·||_{E}$ is the uniform norm on E. The above condition is fulfilled e.g. for all regular (in the sense of the continuity of the pluricomplex Green function) compact sets in $ℂ^{N}$.