On the derivatives of the Heun functions

Abstract: The Heun functions satisfy linear ordinary differential equations of second order with certain singularities in the complex plane. The first order derivatives of the Heun functions satisfy linear second order differential equations with one more singularity. In this paper we compare these equations with linear differential equations isomonodromy deformations of which are described by the Painlev\'e equations $P_{II}-P_{VI}$.