title: The Idiot

text: The Epanchins' visit is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Burdovsky, a young man who claims to be the illegitimate son of Myshkin's late benefactor, Pavlishchev. The inarticulate Burdovsky is supported by a group of insolent young men. These include the consumptive seventeen-year-old Ippolit Terentyev, the nihilist Doktorenko, and Keller, an ex-officer who, with the help of Lebedyev, has written an article vilifying the Prince and Pavlishchev. They demand money from Myshkin as a "just" reimbursement for Pavlishchev's support, but their arrogant bravado is severely dented when Gavril Ardalionovich, who has been researching the matter on Myshkin's behalf, proves conclusively that the claim is false and that Burdovsky has been deceived. The Prince tries to reconcile with the young men and offers financial support anyway. Disgusted, Lizaveta Prokofyevna loses all control and furiously attacks both parties. Ippolit laughs, and Lizaveta Prokofyevna seizes him by the arm, causing him to break into a prolonged fit of coughing. But he suddenly becomes calm, informs them all that he is near death, and politely requests that he be permitted to talk to them for a while. He awkwardly attempts to express his need for their love, eventually bringing both himself and Lizaveta Prokofyevna to the point of tears. But as the Prince and Lizaveta Prokofyevna discuss what to do with the invalid, another transformation occurs and Ippolit, after unleashing a torrent of abuse at the Prince, leaves with the other young men. The Epanchins also leave, both Lizaveta Prokofyevna and Aglaya deeply indignant with the Prince. Only Yevgeny Pavlovich remains in good spirits, and he smiles charmingly as he says good-bye. At that moment, a magnificent carriage pulls up at the dacha, and the ringing voice of Nastasya Filippovna calls out to Yevgeny Pavlovich. In a familiar tone, she tells him not to worry about all the IOUs as Rogozhin has bought them up. The carriage departs, leaving everyone, particularly Yevgeny Pavlovich and the Prince, in a state of shock. Yevgeny Pavlovich claims to know nothing about the debts, and Nastasya Filippovna's motives become a subject of anxious speculation.


title: The Idiot

text: Reconciling with Lizaveta Prokofyevna, the Prince visits the Epanchins at their dacha. He is beginning to fall in love with Aglaya, and she likewise appears to be fascinated by him, though she often mocks or angrily reproaches him for his naiveté and excessive humility. Myshkin joins Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters and Yevgeny Pavlovich for a walk to the park to hear the music. While listening to the high-spirited conversation and watching Aglaya in a kind of daze, he notices Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna in the crowd. Nastasya Filippovna again addresses herself to Yevgeny Pavlovich, and in the same jolly tone as before loudly informs him that his uncle—a wealthy and respected old man from whom he is expecting a large inheritance—has shot himself and that a huge sum of government money is missing. Yevgeny Pavlovich stares at her in shock as Lizaveta Prokofyevna makes a hurried exit with her daughters. Nastasya Filippovna hears an officer friend of Yevgeny Pavlovich suggest that a whip is needed for women like her, and she responds by grabbing a riding-whip from a bystander and striking the officer across the face with it. He tries to attack her but Myshkin restrains him, for which he is violently pushed. Rogozhin, after making a mocking comment to the officer, leads Nastasya Filippovna away. The officer recovers his composure, addresses himself to Myshkin, politely confirms his name, and leaves.


title: The Idiot

text: Myshkin follows the Epanchins back to their dacha, where eventually Aglaya finds him alone on the verandah. To his surprise, she begins to talk to him very earnestly about duels and how to load a pistol. They are interrupted by General Epanchin who wants Myshkin to walk with him. Aglaya slips a note into Myshkin's hand as they leave. The General is greatly agitated by the effect Nastasya Filippovna's behavior is having on his family, particularly since her information about Yevgeny Pavlovich's uncle has turned out to be completely correct. When the General leaves, Myshkin reads Aglaya's note, which is an urgent request to meet her secretly the following morning. His reflections are interrupted by Keller who has come to offer to be his second at the duel that will inevitably follow from the incident that morning, but Myshkin merely laughs heartily and invites Keller to visit him to drink champagne. Keller departs and Rogozhin appears. He informs the Prince that Nastasya Filippovna wants to see him and that she has been in correspondence with Aglaya. She is convinced that the Prince is in love with Aglaya, and is seeking to bring them together. Myshkin is perturbed by the information, but he remains in an inexplicably happy frame of mind and speaks with forgiveness and brotherly affection to Rogozhin. Remembering it will be his birthday tomorrow, he persuades Rogozhin to join him for some wine.


title: The Idiot

text: They find that a large party has assembled at his home and that the champagne is already flowing. Present are Lebedyev, his daughter Vera, Ippolit, Burdovsky, Kolya, General Ivolgin, Ganya, Ptitsyn, Ferdyshchenko, Keller, and, to Myshkin's surprise, Yevgeny Pavlovich, who has come to ask for his friendship and advice. The guests greet the Prince warmly and compete for his attention. Stimulated by Lebedyev's eloquence, everyone engages for some time in intelligent and inebriated disputation on lofty subjects, but the good-humoured atmosphere begins to dissipate when Ippolit suddenly produces a large envelope and announces that it contains an essay he has written which he now intends to read to them. The essay is a painfully detailed description of the events and thoughts leading him to what he calls his 'final conviction': that suicide is the only possible way to affirm his will in the face of nature's invincible laws, and that consequently he will be shooting himself at sunrise. The reading drags on for over an hour and by its end the sun has risen. Most of his audience, however, are bored and resentful, apparently not at all concerned that he is about to shoot himself. Only Vera, Kolya, Burdovsky and Keller seek to restrain him. He distracts them by pretending to abandon the plan, then suddenly pulls out a small pistol, puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger. There is a click but no shot: Ippolit faints but is not killed. It turns out that he had taken out the cap earlier and forgotten to put it back in. Ippolit is devastated and tries desperately to convince everyone that it was an accident. Eventually he falls asleep and the party disperses.


title: The Idiot

text: The Prince wanders for some time in the park before falling asleep at the green seat appointed by Aglaya as their meeting place. Her laughter wakes him from an unhappy dream about Nastasya Filippovna. They talk for a long time about the letters Aglaya has received, in which Nastasya Filippovna writes that she herself is in love with Aglaya and passionately beseeches her to marry Myshkin. Aglaya interprets this as evidence that Nastasya Filippovna is in love with him herself, and demands that Myshkin explain his feelings toward her. Myshkin replies that Nastasya Filippovna is insane, that he only feels profound compassion and is not in love with her, but admits that he has come to Pavlovsk for her sake. Aglaya becomes angry, demands that he throw the letters back in her face, and storms off. Myshkin reads the letters with dread, and later that day Nastasya Filippovna herself appears to him, asking desperately if he is happy, and telling him she is going away and will not write any more letters. Rogozhin escorts her.


title: The Idiot

text: It is clear to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and General Epanchin that their daughter is in love with the Prince, but Aglaya denies this and angrily dismisses talk of marriage. She continues to mock and reproach him, often in front of others, and lets slip that, as far as she is concerned, the problem of Nastasya Filippovna is yet to be resolved. Myshkin himself merely experiences an uncomplicated joy in her presence and is mortified when she appears to be angry with him. Lizaveta Prokofyevna feels it is time to introduce the Prince to their aristocratic circle and a dinner party is arranged for this purpose, to be attended by a number of eminent persons. Aglaya, who does not share her parents' respect for these people and is afraid that Myshkin's eccentricity will not meet with their approval, tries to tell him how to behave, but ends by sarcastically telling him to be as eccentric as he likes, and to be sure to wave his arms about when he is pontificating on some high-minded subject and break her mother's priceless Chinese vase. Feeling her anxiety, Myshkin too becomes extremely anxious, but he tells her that it is nothing compared to the joy he feels in her company. He tries to approach the subject of Nastasya Filippovna again, but she silences him and hurriedly leaves.


title: The Idiot

text: For a while the dinner party proceeds smoothly. Inexperienced in the ways of the aristocracy, Myshkin is deeply impressed by the elegance and good humour of the company, unsuspicious of its superficiality. It turns out that one of those present—Ivan Petrovich—is a relative of his beloved benefactor Pavlishchev, and the Prince becomes extraordinarily enthusiastic. But when Ivan Petrovich mentions that Pavlishchev ended by giving up everything and going over to the Catholic Church, Myshkin is horrified. He launches unexpectedly into an anti-Catholic tirade, claiming that it preaches the Antichrist and in its quest for political supremacy has given birth to Atheism. Everyone present is shocked and several attempts are made to stop or divert him, but he only becomes more animated. At the height of his fervor he begins waving his arms about and knocks over the priceless Chinese vase, smashing it to pieces. As Myshkin emerges from his profound astonishment, the general horror turns to amusement and concern for his health. But it is only temporary, and he soon begins another spontaneous discourse, this time on the subject of the aristocracy in Russia, once again becoming oblivious to all attempts to quell his ardour. The speech is only brought to an end by the onset of an epileptic seizure: Aglaya, deeply distressed, catches him in her arms as he falls. He is taken home, having left a decidedly negative impression on the guests.


title: The Idiot

text: The next day Ippolit visits the Prince to inform him that he and others (such as Lebedyev and Ganya) have been intriguing against him, and have been unsettling Aglaya with talk of Nastasya Filippovna. Ippolit has arranged, at Aglaya's request and with Rogozhin's help, a meeting between the two women. That evening Aglaya, having left her home in secret, calls for the Prince. They proceed in silence to the appointed meeting place, where both Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin are already present. It soon becomes apparent that Aglaya has not come there to discuss anything, but to chastise and humiliate Nastasya Filippovna, and a bitter exchange of accusations and insults ensues. Nastasya Filippovna orders Rogozhin to leave and hysterically demands of Myshkin that he stay with her. Myshkin, once again torn by her suffering, is unable to deny her and reproaches Aglaya for her attack. Aglaya looks at him with pain and hatred, and runs off. He goes after her but Nastasya Filippovna stops him desperately and then faints. Myshkin stays with her.


title: The Idiot

text: In accordance with Nastasya Filippovna's wish, she and the Prince become engaged. Public opinion is highly critical of Myshkin's actions toward Aglaya, and the Epanchins break off all relations with him. He tries to explain to Yevgeny Pavlovich that Nastasya Filippovna is a broken soul, that he must stay with her or she will probably die, and that Aglaya will understand if he is only allowed to talk to her. Yevgeny Pavlovich refuses to facilitate any contact between them and suspects that Myshkin himself is mad.


title: The Idiot

text: On the day of the wedding, a beautifully attired Nastasya Filippovna is met by Keller and Burdovsky, who are to escort her to the church where Myshkin is waiting. A large crowd has gathered, among whom is Rogozhin. Seeing him, Nastasya Filippovna rushes to him and tells him hysterically to take her away, which Rogozhin loses no time in doing. The Prince, though shaken, is not particularly surprised at this development. For the remainder of the day he calmly fulfills his social obligations to guests and members of the public. The following morning he takes the first train to Petersburg and goes to Rogozhin's house, but he is told by servants that there is no one there. After several hours of fruitless searching, he returns to the hotel he was staying at when he last encountered Rogozhin in Petersburg. Rogozhin appears and asks him to come back to the house. They enter the house in secret and Rogozhin leads him to the dead body of Nastasya Filippovna: he has stabbed her through the heart. The two men keep vigil over the body, which Rogozhin has laid out in his study.


title: The Idiot

text: Rogozhin is sentenced to fifteen years hard labor in Siberia. Myshkin goes mad and, through the efforts of Yevgeny Pavlovich, returns to the sanatorium in Switzerland. The Epanchins go abroad and Aglaya elopes with a wealthy, exiled Polish count who later is discovered to be neither wealthy, nor a count, nor an exile—at least, not a political exile—and who, along with a Catholic priest, has turned her against her family.


title: The Idiot

text: Prince Myshkin, the novel's central character, is a young man who has returned to Russia after a long period abroad where he was receiving treatment for epilepsy. The lingering effects of the illness, combined with his innocence and lack of social experience, sometimes create the superficial and completely false impression of mental or psychological deficiency. Most of the other characters at one time or another refer to him disparagingly as an 'idiot', but nearly all of them are deeply affected by him. In truth he is highly intelligent, self-aware, intuitive and empathic. He is someone who has thought deeply about human nature, morality and spirituality, and is capable of expressing those thoughts with great clarity.


title: The Idiot

text: Nastasya Filippovna, the main female protagonist, is darkly beautiful, intelligent, fierce and mocking, an intimidating figure to most of the other characters. Of noble birth but orphaned at age 7, she was manipulated into a position of sexual servitude by her guardian, the voluptuary Totsky. Her broken innocence and the social perception of disgrace produce an intensely emotional and destructive personality. The Prince is deeply moved by her beauty and her suffering, and despite feeling that she is insane, remains devoted to her. She is torn between Myshkin's compassion and Rogozhin's obsession with her.


title: The Idiot

text: Rogózhin (Parfyón Semyónovich), who has just inherited a huge fortune from his merchant father, is madly in love with Nastasya Filippovna, and recklessly abandons himself to pursuing her. He instinctively likes and trusts the Prince when they first meet, but later develops a hatred for him out of jealousy. The character represents passionate, instinctive love, as opposed to Myshkin's Christian love based in compassion.


title: The Idiot

text: Agláya Ivánovna is the radiantly beautiful youngest daughter of Myshkin's distant relative Lizaveta Prokofyevna and her husband, the wealthy and respected General Epanchin. Aglaya is proud, commanding and impatient, but also full of arch humour, laughter and innocence, and the Prince is particularly drawn to her after the darkness of his time with Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin.


title: The Idiot

text: Ippolít Teréntyev is a young nihilist intellectual who is in the final stages of tuberculosis and near death. Still full of youthful idealism, he craves love and recognition from others, but their indifference and his own morbid self-obsession lead him to increasing extremes of cynicism and defiance. The character is a 'quasi-double' for Myshkin: their circumstances force them to address the same metaphysical questions, but their responses are diametrically opposed.


title: The Idiot

text: A dialogue between the intimately related themes of atheism and Christian faith (meaning, for Dostoevsky, Russian Orthodoxy) pervades the entire novel. Dostoevsky's personal image of Christian faith, formed prior to his philosophical engagement with Orthodoxy but never abandoned, was one that emphasized the human need for belief in the immortality of the soul, and identified Christ with ideals of "beauty, truth, brotherhood and Russia". The character of Prince Myshkin was originally intended to be an embodiment of this "lofty (Russian) Christian idea". With the character's immersion in the increasingly materialistic and atheistic world of late 19th century Russia, the idea is constantly being elaborated, tested in every scene and against every other character. However, Myshkin's Christianity is not a doctrine or a set of beliefs but is something that he lives spontaneously in his relations with all others. Whenever he appears "hierarchical barriers between people suddenly become penetrable, an inner contact is formed between them... His personality possesses the peculiar capacity to relativize everything that disunifies people and imparts a "false seriousness" to life."


title: The Idiot

text: The young nihilist Ippolit Terentyev is the character that provides the most coherent articulation of the atheist challenge to Myshkin's worldview, most notably in the long essay 'An Essential Explanation' which he reads to the gathering at the Prince's birthday celebration in part 3 of the novel. Here he picks up a motif first touched upon early in part 2, in a dialogue between Myshkin and Rogozhin, when they are contemplating the copy of Holbein's "Dead Christ" in Rogozhin's house, and Rogozhin confesses that the painting is eroding his faith. Holbein's painting held a particular significance for Dostoevsky because he saw in it his own impulse "to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it". The character of Ippolit argues that the painting, which depicts with unflinching realism the tortured, already putrefying corpse of Christ within the tomb, represents the triumph of blind nature over the vision of immortality in God that Christ's existence on Earth signified. He is unable to share Myshkin's intuition of the harmonious unity of all Being, an intuition evoked most intensely earlier in the novel in a description of the pre-epileptic aura. Consequently, the inexorable laws of nature appear to Ippolit as something monstrous, particularly in the light of his own approaching death from tuberculosis: "It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed... I remember someone taking me by the arm, a candle in his hands, and showing me some sort of enormous and repulsive tarantula, assuring me that this was that same dark, blind and all-powerful creature, and laughing at my indignation."The Prince does not directly engage with Ippolit's atheistic arguments, as a religious ideologist might: rather, he recognizes Ippolit as a kindred spirit, and empathetically perceives his youthful struggle with both his own inner negation and the cruelty, irony, and indifference of the world around him.


title: The Idiot

text: The Prince's Christianity, insofar as he is the embodiment of the 'Russian Christian idea', explicitly excludes Catholicism. His unexpected tirade at the Epanchins' dinner party is based in unequivocal assertions that Catholicism is "an unChristian faith", that it preaches the Antichrist, and that its appropriation and distortion of Christ's teaching into a basis for the attainment of political supremacy has given birth to atheism. The Catholic Church, he claims, is merely a continuation of the Western Roman Empire: cynically exploiting the person and teaching of Christ it has installed itself on the earthly throne and taken up the sword to entrench and expand its power. This is a betrayal of the true teaching of Christ, a teaching that transcends the lust for earthly power (the Devil's Third Temptation), and speaks directly to the individual's and the people's highest emotions—those that spring from what Myshkin calls "spiritual thirst". Atheism and socialism are a reaction, born of profound disillusionment, to the Church's defilement of its own moral and spiritual authority.


title: The Idiot

text: It is because of this "spiritual thirst" that Myshkin is so uncompromisingly scathing about the influence of Catholicism and atheism in Russia. The Russian, he claims, not only feels this thirst with great urgency, but is, by virtue of it, particularly susceptible to false faiths:"In our country if a man goes over to Catholicism, he unfailingly becomes a Jesuit, and one of the most clandestine sort, at that; if he becomes an atheist, he will at once begin to demand the eradication of belief in God by coercion, that is, by the sword... It is not from vanity alone, not from mere sordid vain emotions that Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits proceed, but from a spiritual pain, a spiritual thirst, a yearning for something more exalted, for a firm shore, a motherland in which they have ceased to believe..."


title: The Idiot

text: The theme of the maleficent influence of Catholicism on the Russian soul is expressed, in a less obvious and polemical way, through the character of Aglaya Epanchin. Passionate and idealistic, like 'the Russian' alluded to in the anti-Catholic diatribe, Aglaya struggles with the ennui of middle class mediocrity and hates the moral vacuity of the aristocracy to whom her parents kowtow. Her 'yearning for the exalted' has attracted her to militant Catholicism, and in the Prince's devotion to Nastasya Filippovna she sees the heroism of a Crusader-Knight abandoning everything to go in to battle for his Christian ideal. She is deeply angry when, instead of "defending himself triumphantly" against his enemies (Ippolit and his nihilist friends), he tries to make peace with them and offers assistance. Aglaya's tendency to misinterpret Myshkin's motives leads to fractures in what is otherwise a blossoming of innocent love. When the Epanchins go abroad after the final catastrophe, Aglaya, under the influence of a Catholic priest, abandons her family and elopes with a Polish 'Count'.


title: The Idiot

text: In his notes Dostoevsky distinguishes the Prince from other characters of the virtuous type in fiction (such as Don Quixote and Pickwick) by emphasizing innocence rather than comicality. In one sense Myshkin's innocence is an instrument of satire since it brings in to sharp relief the corruption and egocentricity of those around him. But his innocence is serious rather than comical, and he has a deeper insight into the psychology of human beings in general by assuming its presence in everyone else, even as they laugh at him, or try to deceive and exploit him. Examples of this combination of innocence and insight can be found in Myshkin's interactions with virtually all the other characters. He explains it himself in an episode with the roguish but 'honourable' Keller, who has confessed that he has sought the Prince out for motives that are simultaneously noble (he wants spiritual guidance) and mercenary (he wants to borrow a large sum of money from him). The Prince guesses that he has come to borrow money before he has even mentioned it, and unassumingly engages him in a conversation about the psychological oddity of 'double thoughts':Two thoughts coincided, that very often happens... I think it's a bad thing and, you know, Keller, I reproach myself most of all for it. What you told me just now could have been about me. I've even sometimes thought that all human beings are like that, because it's terribly difficult to fight those "double thoughts"... At any rate, I am not your judge... You used cunning to coax money out of me by means of tears, but you yourself swear that your confession had a different aim, a noble one; as for the money, you need it to go on a drinking spree, don't you? And after such a confession that's weakness of course. But how can one give up drinking sprees in a single moment? It's impossible. So what is to be done? It is best to leave it to your own conscience, what do you think?


title: The Idiot

text: Aglaya Ivanovna, despite her occasional fury at his apparent passivity, understands this aspect of Myshkin's innocence, and expresses it in their conversation at the green seat when she speaks of the "two parts of the mind: one that's important and one that's not important".


title: The Idiot

text: Nastasya Filippovna is a character who embodies the internal struggle between innocence and guilt. Isolated and sexually exploited by Totsky from the age of sixteen, Nastasya Filippovna has inwardly embraced her social stigmatization as a corrupted 'fallen woman', but this conviction is intimately bound to its opposite—the victimized child's sense of a broken innocence that longs for vindication. The combination produces a cynical and destructive outer persona, which disguises a fragile and deeply hurt inner being. When the Prince speaks to her, he addresses only this inner being, and in him she sees and hears the long dreamt-of affirmation of her innocence. But the self-destructive voice of her guilt, so intimately bound to the longing for innocence, does not disappear as a result, and constantly reasserts itself. Myshkin divines that in her constant reiteration of her shame there is a "dreadful, unnatural pleasure, as if it were a revenge on someone." Its principal outward form is the repeated choice to submit herself to Rogozhin's obsession with her, knowing that its end result will almost certainly be her own death.


title: The Idiot

text: The theme of the intrapsychic struggle between innocence and guilt is manifested, in idiosyncratic forms, in many of the characters in the novel. The character of General Ivolgin, for example, constantly tells outrageous lies, but to those who understand him (such as Myshkin, Lebedyev and Kolya) he is the noblest and most honest of men. He commits a theft out of weakness, but is so overcome by shame that it helps precipitate a stroke. Lebedyev is constantly plotting and swindling, but he is also deeply religious, and is periodically overcome by paroxysms of guilt-ridden self-loathing. Myshkin himself has a strong tendency to feel ashamed of his own thoughts and actions. The fact that Rogozhin reaches the point of attacking him with a knife is something for which he feels himself to be equally guilty because his own half-conscious suspicions were the same as Rogozhin's half-conscious impulse. When Burdovsky, who has unceremoniously demanded money from him on the basis of a falsehood, gets increasingly insulted by his attempts to offer assistance, Myshkin reproaches himself for his own clumsiness and lack of tact.


title: The Idiot

text: In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to execution by firing squad for his part in the activities of the Petrashevsky Circle. Shortly after the period of interrogation and trial, he and his fellow prisoners were taken, without warning, to Semyonovsky Square where the sentence of death was read out over them. The first three prisoners were tied to stakes facing the firing squad: Dostoevsky was among the next in line. Just as the first shots were about to be fired, a message arrived from the Tsar commuting the sentences to hard labor in Siberia.


title: The Idiot

text: The experience had a profound effect on Dostoevsky, and in Part 1 of "The Idiot" (written twenty years after the event) the character of Prince Myshkin repeatedly speaks in depth on the subject of capital punishment. On one occasion, conversing with the Epanchin women, he recounts an anecdote that exactly mirrors Dostoevsky's own experience. A man of 27, who had committed a political offence, was taken to the scaffold with his comrades, where a death sentence by firing squad was read out to them. Twenty minutes later, with all the preparations for the execution having been completed, they were unexpectedly reprieved, but for those twenty minutes the man lived with the complete certainty that he was soon to face sudden death. According to this man, the mind recoils so powerfully against the reality of its imminent death that the experience of time itself is radically altered. The mind speeds up exponentially as the moment approaches, causing time to expand correspondingly, even reaching the point where the tiny amount of conventional human time left is experienced inwardly as unbearable in its enormity. Eventually, the man said, he "longed to be shot quickly".


title: The Idiot

text: The subject of capital punishment first comes up earlier in Part 1, when the Prince is waiting with a servant for General Epanchin to appear. Engaging the servant in conversation, the Prince tells the harrowing story of an execution by guillotine that he recently witnessed in France. He concludes the description with his own reflections on the horror of death by execution:... the worst, most violent pain lies not in injuries, but in the fact that you know for certain that within the space of an hour, then ten minutes, then half a minute, then now, right at this moment—your soul will fly out of your body, and you'll no longer be a human being, and that this is certain; the main thing is that it is "certain". When you put your head right under the guillotine and hear it sliding above your head, it's that quarter of a second that's most terrible of all... Who can say that human nature is able to endure such a thing without going mad? Why such mockery—ugly, superfluous, futile? Perhaps the man exists to whom his sentence has been read out, has been allowed to suffer, and then been told: "off you go, you've been pardoned". A man like that could tell us perhaps. Such suffering and terror were what Christ spoke of. No, a human being should not be treated like that!


title: The Idiot

text: Later, when he is conversing with the Epanchin sisters, the Prince suggests to Adelaida, who has asked him for a subject to paint, that she paint the face of a condemned man a minute before the guillotine falls. He carefully explains his reasons for the suggestion, enters in to the emotions and thoughts of the condemned man, and describes in meticulous detail what the painting should depict. In this description Myshkin takes the contemplation of the condemned man's inward experience of time a step further and asks: what would the mind be experiencing in the last tenth of a second, as it hears the iron blade sliding above? And what would be experienced if, as some argue, the mind continues for some time "after" the head has been cut off? The Prince breaks off without answering, but the implication is that the victim experiences these 'moments' of unspeakable terror as vast stretches of time.


title: The Idiot

text: In part 2, the usually comical character of Lebedyev also considers the horror of the moment before execution. In the midst of a heated exchange with his nihilist nephew he expresses deep compassion for the soul of the Countess du Barry, who died in terror on the guillotine after pleading for her life with the executioner.


title: The Idiot

text: For much of his adult life Dostoevsky suffered from an unusual and at times extremely debilitating form of temporal lobe epilepsy. In 1867 (the same year he began work on "The Idiot") he wrote to his doctor: "this epilepsy will end up by carrying me off... My memory has grown completely dim. I don't recognize people anymore... I'm afraid of going mad or falling into idiocy". Dostoevsky's attacks were preceded by a brief period of intense joyous mystical experience which he described as being worth years of his life, or perhaps even his whole life. A similar illness plays an important part in the characterization of Prince Myshkin, partly because the severity of the condition and its after-effects (disorientation, amnesia, aphasia, among others) contributes significantly to the myth of the character's 'idiocy'.


title: The Idiot

text: Although Myshkin himself is completely aware that he is not an 'idiot' in any pejorative sense, he sometimes concedes the aptness of the word in relation to his mental state during particularly severe attacks. He occasionally makes reference to the pre-narrative period prior to his confinement in a Swiss sanatorium, when the symptoms were chronic and he really was "almost an idiot". Paradoxically, it is also clear that aspects of the disease are intimately connected to a profound "intensification" of his mental faculties, and are a significant cause of the development of his higher spiritual preoccupations:...there was a certain stage almost immediately before the fit itself when, amidst the sadness, the mental darkness, the pressure, his brain suddenly seemed to burst into flame, and with an extraordinary jolt all his vital forces seemed to be tensed together. The sensation of life and of self-awareness increased tenfold at those moments... The mind, the heart were flooded with an extraordinary light; all his unrest, all his doubts, all his anxieties were resolved into a kind of higher calm, full of a serene, harmonious joy and hope. Although for Myshkin these moments represented an intimation of the highest truth, he also knew that "stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy stood before him as the consequence of these 'highest moments'." At the end of the novel, after Rogozhin has murdered Nastasya Filippovna, the Prince appears to descend completely into this darkness.


title: The Idiot

text: The consciousness of the inevitability of death and the effect that this consciousness has on the living soul is a recurring theme in the novel. A number of characters are shaped, each according to the nature of their own self-consciousness, by their proximity to death. Most notable in this respect are Prince Myshkin, Ippolit, Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin.


title: The Idiot

text: The anecdote of the man reprieved from execution is an illustration, drawn from the author's own experience, of the extraordinary value of life as revealed in the moment of imminent death. The most terrible realization for the condemned man, according to Myshkin, is that of a wasted life, and he is consumed by the desperate desire for another chance. After his reprieve, the man vows to live every moment of life conscious of its infinite value (although he confesses to failing to fulfil the vow). Through his own emergence from a prolonged period on the brink of derangement, unconsciousness and death, the Prince himself has awoken to the joyous wonder of life, and all his words, moral choices and relations with others are guided by this fundamental insight. Joseph Frank, drawing on the theology of Albert Schweitzer, places the Prince's insight in the context of "the eschatological tension that is the soul of the primitive Christian ethic, whose doctrine of "Agape" was conceived in the same perspective of the imminent end of time." Myshkin asserts that in the ecstatic moment of the pre-epileptic aura he is able to comprehend the extraordinary phrase (from the Book of Revelation, 10:6): ""there shall be time no longer"".


title: The Idiot

text: Like Myshkin, Ippolit is haunted by death and has a similar reverence for the beauty and mystery of life, but his self-absorbed atheist-nihilist worldview pushes him toward opposite conclusions. While the Prince's worldview reflects the birth of his faith in a higher world-harmony, Ippolit's concern with death develops into a metaphysical resentment of nature's omnipotence, her utter indifference to human suffering in general and to his own suffering in particular. In the character of Ippolit, Dostoevsky again considers the terrible dilemma of the condemned man. Ippolit speaks of his illness as a "death sentence" and of himself as "a man condemned to death". In his 'Essential Explanation' he argues passionately that meaningful action is impossible when one knows one is going to die. The living soul absolutely requires that its future be open, not pre-determined, and it rebels irrepressibly against the imposition of a definite end. Ippolit conceives the idea of suicide as the only way left to him of asserting his will in the face of nature's death sentence.


title: The Idiot

text: Dostoevsky's notebooks for "The Idiot" during the time of its serial publication clearly indicate that he never knew what successive installments would contain. The method of testing the central idea in a series of extreme situations, allowing each character to freely respond, meant that there could be no pre-determined development of either plot or character: the author himself was just as surprised as the characters at what happened or didn't happen. This uncontrived approach to writing becomes, in the novel, a depiction of what Morson calls "the openness of time". In the usual novel, the apparently free acts of the characters are an illusion as they only serve to bring about a future that has been contrived by the author. But in real life, even with a belief in determinism or preordination, the subject always assumes its freedom and acts as though the future were unwritten. Dostoevsky's extemporaneous approach helped facilitate the representation of the actual position of human subjectivity, as an open field of possibility where the will is free at all times, despite the apparent necessity of cause and effect. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, "Dostoevsky always represents a person "on the threshold" of a final decision, at a moment of "crisis", at an unfinalizable—and "unpredeterminable"—turning point for their soul."


title: The Idiot

text: Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to modern tendencies toward the ""reification" of man"—the turning of human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, etc.), enclosing them in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility. 'Carnivalization' is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival. In "The Idiot", everything revolves around the two central carnival figures of the "idiot" and the "madwoman", and consequently "all of life is carnivalized, turned into a 'world inside out': traditional plot situations radically change their meaning, there develops a dynamic, carnivalistic play of sharp contrasts, unexpected shifts and changes". Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna are characters that inherently elude conventional social definition, or—as Bakhtin puts it—anything that might limit their ""pure humanness"". The carnival atmosphere that develops around them in each situation and dialogue ("bright and joyous" in Myshkin's case, "dark and infernal" in Nastasya Filippovna's) allows Dostoevsky to "expose a different side of life to himself and to the reader, to spy upon and depict in that life certain new, unknown depths and possibilities."


title: The Idiot

text: Carnivalization helps generate the artistic phenomenon that Bakhtin felt was unique to Dostoevsky in literature: Polyphony. Analogous to musical polyphony, literary polyphony is the simultaneous presence of multiple independent voices, each with its own truth and validity, but always coincident with other voices, affecting them and being affected by them. Bakhtin defines it as "the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses". In the polyphonic novel each character's voice speaks for itself: the narrator and even the author are present in the narrative merely as one voice among others. No voice has a privileged authority, and all have a form that inherently expresses engagement with other voices. Thus events unfold "dialogically", as a consequence of the interaction between discrete voices, not as a consequence of authorial design:What unfolds... is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a "plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world", combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevsky's major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, "not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse".


title: The Idiot

text: Despite the appearance of omniscience, the narrator of "The Idiot" is given a distinct voice like any other character, and often conveys only a partial understanding of the events he is describing. It is the voice of a highly perceptive and meticulous "reporter of the facts", who has, despite this objectivity, a particular perspective on what he is reporting, occasionally even lapsing into pontification. At one point in his notes Dostoevsky admonishes himself to "write more concisely: only the facts. Write in the sense of "people say"..." The narrator's resort to 'the facts' has the effect of "placing the facts on the side of rumor and mystery rather than on the side of description and explanation." The narrator is thus not omniscient, but a particular kind of insightful but limited spectator, and in the end he openly admits to the reader that the Prince's behaviour is inexplicable to him. According to Frank, "this limitation of the narrator is part of Dostoevsky's effort to present Myshkin's behaviour as transcending "all" the categories of worldly moral-social experience."


title: The Idiot

text: For Bakhtin the narrator's voice is another participant, albeit of a special kind, in the "great dialogue" that constitutes the Dostoevsky novel. All voices, all ideas, once they enter the world of the novel, take on an imaginary form that positions them in dialogical relationship with the other voices and ideas. In this sense, even the author's own ideological positions, when they are expressed through the narrator, or Myshkin, or Lebedyev, "become thoroughly dialogized and enter the great dialogue of the novel on "completely equal terms" with the other idea-images". Since the most important thing for Dostoevsky in the construction of his novels is the dialogic interaction of a multiplicity of voices, the author's discourse "cannot encompass the hero and his word on all sides, cannot lock in and finalize him from without. It can only address itself to him."


title: The Idiot

text: Critical reception of "The Idiot" at the time of its publication in Russia was almost uniformly negative. This was partly because a majority of the reviewers considered themselves to be opposed to Dostoevsky's 'conservatism', and wished to discredit the book's supposed political intentions. However the chief criticism, among both reviewers and general readers, was in the "fantasticality" of the characters. The radical critic D.I. Minaev wrote: "People meet, fall in love, slap each other's face—and all at the author's first whim, without any artistic truth." V.P. Burenin, a liberal, described the novel's presentation of the younger generation as "the purest fruit of the writer's subjective fancy" and the novel as a whole as "a belletristic compilation, concocted from a multitude of absurd personages and events, without any concern for any kind of artistic objectivity." Leading radical critic Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin approved of Dostoevsky's attempt to depict the genuinely good man, but castigated him for his scurrilous treatment of "the very people whose efforts are directed at the very objective apparently pursued by him... On the one hand there appear characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some kind of mysterious puppets hopping about as though in a dream..." Dostoevsky responded to Maykov's reports of the prevailing 'fantastical' criticisms with an unashamed characterization of his literary philosophy as "fantastic realism", and claimed that it was far more real, taking contemporary developments in Russia in to consideration, than the so-called realism of his detractors, and could even be used to predict future events.


title: The Idiot

text: French and English translations were published in 1887, and a German translation in 1889. European critical response was also largely negative, mainly due to the novel's apparent formlessness and rambling style. Morson notes that critics saw it as "a complete mess, as if it were written extemporaneously, with no overall structure in mind—as, in fact, it was." Typical of the western critics was the introduction to the first French translation which, while praising the energetic style and characterization, notes that "they are enveloped in a fantastic mist and get lost in innumerable digressions."


title: The Idiot

text: Prominent modern critics acknowledge the novel's apparent structural deficiencies, but also point out that the author was aware of them himself, and that they were perhaps a natural consequence of the experimental approach toward the central idea. Joseph Frank has called "The Idiot" "perhaps the most original of Dostoevsky's great novels, and certainly the most artistically uneven of them all," but he also wondered how it was that the novel "triumphed so effortlessly over the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure." Gary Saul Morson observes that ""The Idiot" brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway."


title: The Idiot

text: The twentieth century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded the structural asymmetry and unpredictability of plot development, as well as the perceived 'fantasticality' of the characters, not as any sort of deficiency, but as entirely consistent with Dostoevsky's unique and groundbreaking literary method. Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as the preeminent exemplar of the Carnivalesque in literature, and as the inventor of the polyphonic novel. A literary approach that incorporates carnivalisation and polyphony in Bakhtin's sense precludes any sort of conventionally recognizable structure or predictable pattern of plot development.


title: The Idiot

text: Since "The Idiot" was first published in Russian, there have been a number of translations into English, including those by:


title: The Idiot

text: The Constance Garnett translation was for many years accepted as the definitive English translation, but more recently it has come under criticism for being dated. The Garnett translation, however, still remains widely available because it is now in the public domain. Some writers, such as Anna Brailovsky, have based their translations on Garnett's. Since the 1990s, new English translations have appeared that have made the novel more accessible to English readers.


title: The Idiot

text: The "Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation" (2000) states that the Alan Myers version is the "best version currently available". Since then, however, new translations by David McDuff and Pevear & Volokhonsky have also been well received.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Maggie Cheung Man-yuk (; born 20 September 1964) is a Hong Kong former actress. Raised in Hong Kong and Britain, she started her career after placing second in 1983's Miss Hong Kong Pageant. She achieved critical success in the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, before taking a break from acting following her last starring role in 2004. She rarely makes public appearances except for fashion events and award ceremonies.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung has won numerous accolades at home and abroad for her acting. She has won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress 5 times in the span of 11 years from 1990 to 2001, and holds the record for most wins in that category. She also holds the record for most wins for the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress in Taiwan, having won 4 times. In the West, she has been awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin International Film Festival in 1992 and Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival in 2004. In 2004, she became the first Asian actress to be nominated for the French César Award for Best Actress.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Her most acclaimed performances include "As Tears Go By", "Center Stage", "", "Green Snake", "The Soong Sisters", "Irma Vep", "Hero" and "Clean". The Wong Kar-wai–directed "In the Mood for Love" (2000), in which she plays a cheongsam-wearing character opposite male lead Tony Leung, is a classic in both the film and fashion worlds.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Maggie Cheung was born in Hong Kong on 20 September 1964 to Shanghainese parents. She attended St. Paul's Primary Catholic School in Happy Valley, where she began at the primary one level. Her family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was eight. She spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Bromley, London, England. She returned to Hong Kong at the age of 18 in 1982 for a vacation but ended up staying for modelling assignments and other commitments. She also briefly had a sales job at the Lane Crawford department store.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: In 1983, Cheung entered the Miss Hong Kong pageant and won the first runner-up and the Miss Photogenic award as well. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year. After two years as a TV presenter, it led to a contract with TVB (the television arm of the Shaw Bros. Studio).


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung is a polyglot as a result of her upbringing in Hong Kong and England and ten years' stay in Paris. In "Center Stage", Cheung performed in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In "Clean", she performed in fluent English, French, and Cantonese.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Soon after her debut, Cheung broke into the film industry, starring in comedies. She caught the attention of Jackie Chan, who cast her in "Police Story" (1985) as May, his long-suffering girlfriend. The film was a huge hit and made Cheung a star overnight. TVB had also cast Barbara Yung and Kent Tong in a period drama, Kings of Ideas (橋王之王) but due to the death of Barbara Yung, the role was assigned to Cheung.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Despite her success, Cheung found herself typecast in the roles of comics or weak, clumsy women. Realizing this, Cheung wanted to break away by seeking more dramatic roles. She got this opportunity when Wong Kar-wai cast her in "As Tears Go By" (1988), her first of many collaborations with Wong. Cheung often cites the film as the piece that truly began her serious acting career, and she won critical praise for it. In 1989, she won Best Actress awards at the Golden Horse Award and Hong Kong Film Award for her work in "Full Moon in New York" and "A Fishy Story" respectively. In 1991, she became the first Chinese performer to win a Best Actress Award at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival for her work in "Center Stage".


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung subsequently proved her versatility with roles in action films. Her performance in the sci-fi martial arts smash hit "The Heroic Trio" (1992) and its sequel, "Executioners" (1993), impressed both critics and audiences with her martial arts skills. Also in a departure from her usual roles, Cheung played a beautiful and vicious femme fatale in "New Dragon Gate Inn" (1992).


title: Maggie Cheung

text: After taking a break in 1994, Cheung returned to film Olivier Assayas' "Irma Vep" (1996), which helped her break into the international scene. That same year, she won further acclaim for her work in the romantic film "", in which she played one of a pair of lovers kept apart for ten years by fate and circumstance. The following year, she made her first English-language film in Wayne Wang's "Chinese Box" (1997). Cast as a mysterious young woman named Jean, Cheung held her own alongside the more internationally well-established stars, Jeremy Irons and Gong Li.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: After her 1998 marriage with Olivier Assayas, Cheung stayed mainly in France. She returned to Hong Kong to film "In the Mood for Love" (2000), which won critical acclaim and a second Taiwanese Golden Horse award for Cheung. Thereafter, she starred in Zhang Yimou's "Hero" (2002) and Wong's "2046" (2004). She won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as a mother who tries to kick her drug habit and reconcile with her long-lost son in "Clean" (2004).


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung was a jury member at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival, the 1999 Venice Film Festival, the 2004 Hawaii International Film Festival, the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and the 2010 Marrakech International Film Festival. And for the first time in its history, the 59th Cannes Film Festival (2006) used a photographic image of a real actress on its poster – that of Cheung.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: On 7 February 2007, "The New York Times" rated Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role as Emily in "Clean". After 25 years of making movies, she decided to retire from acting to pursue a career as a film composer. She had mentioned she would like to compose music and paint after having fulfilled her acting potential. Her last film appearance was as Mazu, Chinese goddess of the sea, in the film "Ten Thousand Waves" (2010) by British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: As UK's "Independent" puts it, since her Cannes moment in 2004, Cheung "turned her back on film" and has shifted her focus to philanthropy, making music, and editing. In April 2010, Cheung was appointed as UNICEF's Ambassador to China. In July 2011, she was awarded a doctor "honoris causa" at the University of Edinburgh. Cheung retired from acting in 2013 and has since kept a low profile.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998; they divorced in 2001. She began a relationship with German architect Ole Scheeren in 2007, but the relationship ended in 2011.


title: Maggie Cheung

text: Cheung has been rumoured to have been romantically involved with "In the Mood for Love" co-star Tony Leung, who is married to fellow actor Carina Lau. Lau quashed rumours of a feud by uploading a photo of her running into Cheung at an airport in 2013.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: Leverage: Redemption is an American action crime drama television revival of "Leverage" with most of the main cast returning. The first eight episodes premiered on Freevee on July 9, 2021, with an additional eight episodes released on October 8, 2021. In December 2021, the series was renewed for a second season. The second season began airing on November 15, 2022.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: A year after the death of Nate Ford, his widow Sophie Devereaux reunites with her former crew of Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison and Parker. They make the acquaintance of Harry Wilson, a crooked lawyer searching for redemption, and help him con one of his amoral clients. Following the job, Harry convinces the team to stick together and return to "picking up where the law leaves off" while he tries to return to the side of good. The team is also joined by Hardison's foster sister, Breanna Casey, who takes Hardison's place on the crew while Hardison works with various pro-democracy and non-profit organizations around the world. Together, the new team opens a new Leverage Consulting office in New Orleans and continues working to take down rich criminals and help those who need their specific brand of justice.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: On April 22, 2020, IMDb TV announced that a 13-episode revival of the series had been ordered to be broadcast on its streaming service, the now-called Amazon Freevee. Dean Devlin, who served as executive producer on the original series, returned as executive producer for the revival alongside original series creators John Rogers and Chris Downey, who served as consulting producers and writers. Marc Roskin, Rachel Olschan-Wilson, and Kate Rorick are executive producers. Plans included Noah Wyle directing two episodes of the series and Beth Riesgraf also directing one, although Wyle wound up directing three and Beth Riesgraf two. Filming began August 10, 2020 in New Orleans and had wrapped as of March 2021. On April 5, 2021, Bellman tweeted that 16 episodes had been produced, up from the original 13. On December 9, 2021, IMDb TV renewed the series for a second season.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: On April 22, 2020, IMDb announced that four of the original cast members would be returning with Beth Riesgraf, Gina Bellman, and Christian Kane in main roles and Aldis Hodge with a recurring role. Noah Wyle was announced as a new character; the only original cast member not returning for the revival would be Timothy Hutton, following rape allegations. In August 2020, it was announced that Aleyse Shannon was joining the cast as a series regular appearing as Breanna Casey, a hacker who grew up with the same foster mother as Hardison. In March 2021, it was announced James Marsters would be guest starring in the series.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: The series was released in two parts, with the first eight episodes of the series premiering on IMDb TV on July 9, 2021, and the remaining eight episodes released on October 8, 2021. In Canada, the series airs on CTV Drama Channel.


title: Leverage: Redemption

text: In February 2022, Timothy Hutton, who played Nathan "Nate" Ford in the original Leverage series, sued producer Electric Entertainment for breach of contract, claiming he was unfairly omitted from participating in the revival of the drama series after he was accused of a 1983 sexual assault in Canada, a claim that was eventually dismissed by prosecutors. This in turn led to a countersuit by the producers, who accused him of purposely withholding an attempt to settle with a victim in order to try and stop a story about the accusations from leaking out near the time of contract negotiations that would surely have stopped him from being offered a role due to it being a violation of the morals clause in a contract; the producers alleged that the allegations surfaced two weeks after principal term negotiations with Hutton had been successful, while Hutton disputed the idea that the clause existed.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Kitchen Nightmares is an American reality television series formerly broadcast on the Fox network, in which chef Gordon Ramsay is invited by the owners to spend a week with a failing restaurant in an attempt to revive the business. Produced by ITV Studios America, it is based on the British show "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares".


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: The show premiered September 19, 2007, on Fox. On June 23, 2014, Ramsay announced that he was ending the series; the final episode aired on September 12 that year. In June 2018, "Gordon Ramsay's 24 Hours to Hell and Back", a new series with a premise much like "Kitchen Nightmares" but a shorter timeline, premiered on Fox. The show still hosts an active YouTube channel with over 6.3 million subscribers. The channel presents highlights from the show, and has also shown selected full episodes of the show.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: The show was produced by ITV Studios America and Optomen, in association with A. Smith & Co. Productions, with Arthur Smith, Kent Weed, and Patricia Llewellyn serving as executive producers.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In the UK, the series is broadcast under the name "Kitchen Nightmares USA" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA" on Channel 4, which also produced the original UK version. It's broadcast under this name to avoid confusion with the original UK version. UK airings of the US show feature an alternate soundtrack and mix, with less prominent musical stings, a lower level of vocal compression, and a different narrator to the US broadcast. It also airs uncensored, when shown after the watershed. Reruns, along with the British series, are frequently shown on BBC America.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: The third season was originally scheduled to premiere on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, but it was postponed to Friday, January 29, 2010, due to the State of the Union address.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In May 2010, the Fox network announced the return of "Kitchen Nightmares" for a fourth season, which aired from January 21, 2011, to May 20, 2011.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In March 2011, the producers of the show announced a casting call for a fifth season. The fifth season premiered on Friday, September 23, 2011, and ended on March 30, 2012.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In February 2012, Fox announced it had renewed "Kitchen Nightmares" for a sixth season, which premiered on Friday, October 26, 2012.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In September 2007, a case was filed by Martin Hyde, a former manager of Dillon's, against Ramsay for ten separate offenses, including allegedly staging disasters and hiring actors to trick the viewing audience. The case was dismissed because the contract signed by Hyde stipulated arbitration in the event of a legal dispute. The case went into arbitration in 2008.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: In 2018, Oceana Grill sued Ramsay and the show's production company alleging fabrication. Specifically, they claimed that Ramsay staged a scene where he vomited during his kitchen inspection and planted a mouse in a rodent trap "to manufacture drama for their show." The restaurant also argued that a prior settlement from 2011 (before the episode aired) placed limits on the production company's ability to re-use clips from their episode. The 2018 suit was filed after the production company posted clips of the Oceana Grill episode on Facebook.


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Ginia Bellafante of the "New York Times" found Ramsay's teaching methods and high standards "undeniably hypnotic" and commented, "the thrill of watching Mr. Ramsay is in witnessing someone so at peace with his own arrogance."


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Doug Elfman of the "Chicago Sun-Times" said the show is "a very entertaining public service" that "will make you laugh, make you sick, and make you think".


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Randy Cordova of the "Arizona Republic" found Ramsay "just as blustery and foul-mouthed here as he is on "Hell's Kitchen." But he is also oddly endearing, mainly because he genuinely seems invested in the fate of each restaurant".


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Critics have commented that Fox's adaptation of "Kitchen Nightmares" strayed from the strengths of the original Channel 4 series. Maureen Ryan of the "Chicago Tribune" said, "Leave it to Fox to take something the Brits did pretty well and muck it up". She added, "Never mind the cooking; this edition of the show appears to be more interested in playing up the family dramas at the restaurants Ramsay visits".


title: Kitchen Nightmares

text: Robert Lloyd of the "Los Angeles Times" commented, "Whereas the British "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" is fundamentally a food show—it has interesting things to show you about how a restaurant runs and a kitchen works, the wonders of local markets and what you can make from them if you're Gordon Ramsay or willing to follow his instructions—the Fox edition emphasizes mishap, argument, and emotional breakdown almost to the exclusion of cuisine".


title: Leander Paes

text: Leander Adrian Paes ( ; born 17 June 1973) is an Indian former professional tennis player. He is regarded as one of the greatest doubles tennis players ever. He holds the record for the most doubles wins in the Davis Cup. Paes won eight men's doubles and ten mixed doubles Grand Slam titles. He holds a career Grand Slam in men's doubles and mixed doubles, and achieved the rare men's/mixed double at the 1999 Wimbledon Championships. His mixed doubles Wimbledon title in 2010 made him the second man (after Rod Laver) to win Wimbledon titles in three decades.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes received the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna award, India's highest sporting honor, in 1996–97; the Arjuna Award in 1990; the Padma Shri award in 2001; and India's third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan prize in January 2014, for his outstanding contributions tennis. He won a bronze medal for India in men's singles at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. He competed in consecutive Olympics from 1992 to 2016, making him the first Indian and the only tennis player to compete in seven Olympic Games.


title: Leander Paes

text: He is a former Davis Cup team captain, and holds the record for the most Davis Cup doubles wins with 43 victories. He played in World Team Tennis for the Washington Kastles. He was on the 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 championship teams and was named Male MVP for 2009 and 2011. He is the sports ambassador of the Indian state of Haryana. Paes announced his retirement from professional tennis in 2020, before postponing his final season to 2021 following the rescheduling of the Tokyo Olympics.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes was born in Calcutta, India, on 17 June 1973 to Vece Paes, a Goan, and, Jennifer Paes, from Calcutta. He studied at La Martiniere Calcutta, Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School and at St. Xavier's College. His parents were both athletes. Vece was a midfield squad member in the bronze medal-winning Indian field hockey team at the 1972 Munich Olympics although he did not personally receive a medal as he did not take to the field in any of India's matches. His mother captained the Indian basketball team in the 1980 Asian basketball championship. Paes is a direct descendant of Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta through his mother.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes enrolled with the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Academy in Madras (Chennai) in 1985, where he was coached by Dave O'Meara. Paes earned international fame when he won the 1990 Wimbledon Junior title and reached No. 1 in the junior world rankings at age 17.


title: Leander Paes

text: In 2010, he joined the Board of Directors of Olympic Gold Quest, a foundation co-founded by Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone to support talented Indian athletes.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes first won titles at the Junior US Open and the Junior Wimbledon. He turned professional in 1991. He became number 1 in the world junior rankings. In 1992, he reached the quarter finals of the doubles event in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics with Ramesh Krishnan.


title: Leander Paes

text: At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics he beat Fernando Meligeni to win the bronze medal, the first Indian to win an individual medal since KD Jadhav won bronze at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Paes cited the match as one of his greatest performances, in part because his wrist was severely injured. He was awarded the highest sporting honor by the government of India, the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna in 1996.


title: Leander Paes

text: His first successful year in the ATP circuit came in 1993, when he partnered with Sébastien Lareau to reach the US Open doubles semifinal. After a moderate season in 1994, he reached the quarter-finals of the 1995 Australian Open doubles with Kevin Ullyett. From 1996, he partnered with fellow Indian Mahesh Bhupathi. Their first year was not successful, especially in the Grand Slams, reaching the round of 32 only at Wimbledon. 1997 proved to be a much better year for the team, reaching the US Open semifinals. Paes climbed the doubles ranking from no. 89 at the beginning of the year to no. 14 at year-end. That year he made his best singles performance in a Grand Slam, losing in the third round of the 1997 US Open to Cédric Pioline after beating Carlos Costa and Arnaud Boetsch.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes/Bhupathi grew stronger in 1998,and reached the semifinals of three Grand Slams, the Australian Open, the French Open and the US Open. Paes had two of his biggest singles results. The first one came by winning his only ATP singles title at Newport, and the second was beating Pete Sampras, 6–3, 6–4 at the New Haven ATP tournament at their only meeting. In 1999, the duo reached the finals of all four Grand Slams, winning Wimbledon and the French, thus becoming the first Indians to win a doubles event at a Grand Slam. Paes teamed up with Lisa Raymond to win the mixed doubles event at Wimbledon. The year marked his ascent to the no. 1 doubles ranking. The following year, Paes partnered with Sébastien Lareau for the Australian and Jan Siemerink for the French, losing in the first round on both occasions. Paes again teamed with Bhupathi for the US Open, but lost in the first round again.


title: Leander Paes

text: The duo had a disappointing second round exit to Australian duo of Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde at the Sydney Olympics. Paes was given the honor of carrying the Indian Flag at the opening ceremony.


title: Leander Paes

text: In spite of winning the French in 2001, Bhupathi/Paes had first-round exits in the other three Grand Slams. Paes was awarded the Padmashri by the Government of India in 2001. The duo of Paes and Bhupathi won the gold medal at the 2002 Asian Games in Busan. In 2002, Leander paired up with Michael Hill with moderate success.


title: Leander Paes

text: After 2003 Paes increasingly focused on doubles. He won the mixed doubles events at the Australian and Wimbledon with Martina Navratilova, both in 2003. Weeks later, Paes was admitted to the MD Anderson Cancer Center for a suspected brain tumour that was later found to be neurocysticercosis, a parasitic brain infection. He had to miss the US Open, but recovered by the end of that year.


title: Leander Paes

text: In the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, he paired up with Bhupathi, failing again at the semifinals stage. His next Grand Slam success was in the US Open doubles event in 2006 with Martin Damm. Paes led the Indian tennis team at the Doha Asian Games in 2006 and won two golds in the men's doubles (with Bhupathi) and mixed doubles (with Sania Mirza). Paes maintained his doubles ranking in the top 20 in the world between 2005 and 2007. With wins in the Rotterdam and Indian Wells, Paes took his doubles tally to 38.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes/Bhupathi took part in men's doubles at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They were eliminated in the quarter-finals by Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka, who went on to win gold. With Cara Black he won the 2008 US Open mixed doubles title.


title: Leander Paes

text: In 2009, he won the French Open and US Open Men's doubles titles with Lukáš Dlouhý and was the runner-up in mixed at the US Open.


title: Leander Paes

text: He began the 2010 season in good form, again winning the Australian Open mixed doubles title with Cara Black. This was the pair's third consecutive Grand Slam final and the fourth overall.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes and Radek Štěpánek's 2012 Wimbledon tournament ended when the duo lost to Ivan Dodig and Marcelo Melo. Paes and Elena Vesnina reached the finals of the Wimbledon mixed doubles after beating Bob Bryan and Liezel Huber, 7–5, 3–6, 6–3 on 7 July. They lost in the final to Lisa Raymond and Mike Bryan 3–6, 7–5, 4–6.


title: Leander Paes

text: In the 2012 Summer Olympics, the Indian pair (Vishnu Vardhan) lost to French team Michaël Llodra and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, 6–7, 6–4, 3–6.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes and Štěpánek advanced to the finals at the 2012 US Open after their Spanish opponents, Marcel Granollers and Marc López, retired because of injury. However the duo lost in the final of US Open 2012 to the Bryan brothers.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes and Štěpánek kicked off the ATP World Tour Finals with a win against Pakistan's Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi and Dutchman Jean Julien Rojer, 6–4, 7–5. They made it to the semifinals, where they were eliminated by eventual runners-up Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes/Štěpánek won the 2013 US Open, defeating Alexander Peya and Bruno Soares 6–1, 6–3. This was Paes' 3rd US Open men's doubles title and 14th Grand Slam title. In January 2014, Government of India announced its 3rd Highest Civilian Award Padma Bhushan for Paes.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes started his 25th season on the ATP World Tour by partnering with Klaasen to reach the Chennai final, where the team lost to Lu/Marray. On 17 January, he won his 55th tour-level title in his 93rd final at Auckland, again with Klaasen. The team recorded three-match tie break victories en route to the final. With the win, Paes had won at least one trophy every season since 1997.


title: Leander Paes

text: On 1 February, Paes captured his seventh Grand Slam mixed doubles crown at the 2015 Australian Open with Martina Hingis. It was his 15th major crown overall and his third mixed doubles triumph at Melbourne Park. The pair beat defending champions Daniel Nestor and Kristina Mladenovic in the final. As No. 7 seed with Klaasen in men's doubles, Paes lost to eventual champions Bolelli/Fognini in the second round.


title: Leander Paes

text: At the 2015 French Open, Paes started a new partnership with Daniel Nestor. The pair crashed out in the third round; however, Paes became just the seventh male player in Open Era to complete 700 doubles wins.


title: Leander Paes

text: At Wimbledon 2015, Paes again teamed up with Hingis to win the mixed doubles championship. The final 6–1, 6–1 score against fifth seeds Alexander Peya and Tímea Babos came after only 41 minutes. Paes/Nestor reached the third round. By winning his 4th Wimbledon mixed doubles title, Paes shared the record for men's titles in the open era with Owen Davidson.


title: Leander Paes

text: On 12 September 2015, Paes won the mixed doubles at the 2015 US Open with Hingis, defeating Sam Querrey and Bethanie Mattek-Sands in three sets.


title: Leander Paes

text: On 3 June 2016, Leander Paes completed his Career Grand Slam in mixed by winning the 2016 French Open with Hingis, thus joining an elite league of players. He broke Davidson's record for most men's titles. Paes qualified for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Men's Doubles and partnered with Rohan Bopanna. They lost in the first round to the Polish pair of Marcin Matkowski and Łukasz Kubot. He later paired up with Andre Begemann, where they reached the final in the Winston-Salem Open. This pair lost in the first round of the 2016 US Open. He turned up for the Davis Cup against Spain with Saketh Myneni, losing to Rafael Nadal and Marc López in 4 sets.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes played in the 2017 season with his 111th partner, Andre Sa. The duo lost to the Indian pair of Purav Raja and Divij Sharan in the first round of Aircel Chennai Open in straight sets. With this loss, Paes moved down to 64th in doubles ranks. Though India won their Davis Cup tie against New Zealand, Paes and his last-minute partner, Vishnu Vardhan, lost to the New Zealanders Artem Sitak/Michael Venus. Paes and Rohan Bopanna were kept as reserves by new, non-playing captain Mahesh Bhupathi for the tie against Uzbekistan. Eventually, Paes was dropped from the final four, which created controversy. Paes reached the semis of the Dubai Open and at Delray Beach. Paes then played a series of challenger events, never getting his ranking above 49th. He played with Adil Shamasdin, Scott Lipsky, and Purav Raja. It was the first time since 1996 that Paes failed to win a title or reach the final at an ATP tour event in a season.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes continued his partnership with Raja, losing the Maharashtra Open in the first round to defending champions Bopanna/Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan. In the Australian Open, Paes/Raja lost in the round of 16. Paes along with James Cerretani finished as runner up in the Dubai Open. Paes was recalled to India's Davis Cup squad to play against China. On 7 April 2018, Paes became the most successful player in Davis Cup history with his 43rd doubles victory. After going 0–2 down, Paes/Bopanna scripted India's comeback and in the end, India won the tie 3–2. After this, Paes skipped clay and grass court seasons. Paes was selected for the 2018 Asian Games, but the day before the Games started, he opted out citing the lack of a doubles specialist to accompany him. Paes/Cerretani played in several Challenger tournaments, before losing in the first round of the US Open. Paes also played Challengers with Miguel Ángel Reyes-Varela.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes/Reyes-Varela started the 2019 season at the Maharashtra Open. The duo lost a close quarter-final to the eventual champions, Bopanna/Divij Sharan, 17–15 in a match tie-break. Paes/Reyes-Varela then finished as runners-up in the Da Nang Challenger before losing in the first round of the Australian Open. Paes reached the semi-finals of the Hall of Fame Championship in July 2019.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes started his Davis Cup career in 1990, when he partnered Zeeshan Ali in doubles to beat the Japanese team in a five-set encounter. He played a key role on the Indian team that reached the World Group from 1991 to 1998. He was part of the Indian team that reached the semifinals 1993 with wins against Switzerland and France, eventually losing to Australia. In singles, his major wins came against the French duo of Arnaud Boetsch and Henri Leconte in 1993, Wayne Ferreira in 1994, and Goran Ivanišević in 1995 when India defeated Croatia, beating Jan Siemerink in 1996 to defeat Netherlands, and Jiří Novák in 1997. He teamed up with Bhupathi to beat Hirszon/Ivanisevic of Croatia in 1995, Damm/Korda of the Czech Republic in 1997, Massú/Ríos of Chile in 1997, Broad/Henman in 1998, and Aspelin/Björkman of Sweden in 2005. In 2007, Leander had three wins (two doubles and one singles) and no losses.


title: Leander Paes

text: In 1993, he defeated No. 25 Arnaud Boetsch in straight sets on clay. Paes defeated Henri Leconte in the same week, and although Ramesh Krishnan won the tie-breaker against Rodolphe Gilbert, it was Paes who put that match over the top.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes played at the year-end championships with Bhupathi each year from 1997 to 2000, as well as in 2002 and 2011, reaching three finals. In 1997 they lost the final to Rick Leach and Jonathan Stark. They lost 1999 final to Sébastien Lareau and Alex O'Brien. In 2000, they lost the final to Donald Johnson and Pieter Norval.


title: Leander Paes

text: Leander has been described as having a strange playing style by Andre Agassi. He varies his play as the match goes on; he is one of the best volleyers and a talented drop shotter. His volleying techniques were learnt from former Indian player Akhtar Ali. He hits a one-handed backhand, which he drives only seldom, preferring instead to slice when returning serve or rallying from his backhand.


title: Leander Paes

text: Leander Paes is known for changing partnerships, and he has had over 100 different partners over his career. Paes teamed with 25 players in Grand Slam mixed doubles.


title: Leander Paes

text: The duo of Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi was nicknamed the ″Indian Express″. Paes' off-and-on partnership with Bhupathi drew constant media attention in their home country. In the 2006 Asian Games, a loss to the Chinese Taipei team in the team event led Leander to question Bhupathi's commitment to Team India. He once stated in an interview that although he and Bhupathi are friends, he did not consider pairing with his former teammate. However, for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they reunited for their country, losing in the quarterfinals to eventual champions Federer/Wawrinka.


title: Leander Paes

text: In 2011, the pair won doubles at the Chennai Open. They reunited to play in a Grand Slam Tournament after nine years and claimed runners-up in the 2011 Australian Open and reached the semifinals in the year-end championships.


title: Leander Paes

text: The Indian duo has a 303–103 career record together. They have a high success rate against various top teams. They have a Davis Cup record for the longest doubles winning streak, with 24 straight wins.


title: Leander Paes

text: Paes paired with Vishnu Vardhan at the London Olympics 2012, following Bhupathi and Bopanna 's refusal. Paes threatened to withdraw from the Olympics rather than play with Vardhan, whose world ranking was 296, but withdrew the threat a week later. Paes and Vardhan reached the second round of the tournament, losing to French silver medalists Llodra/Tsonga.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-molded plastic case, Rod Holt developed the switching power supply, while Steve Jobs's role in the design of the computer was limited to overseeing Jerry Manock's work on the plastic case. It was introduced by Jobs and Wozniak at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, and marks Apple's first launch of a personal computer aimed at a consumer market—branded toward American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists.


title: Apple II

text: "Byte" magazine referred to the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001, and TRS-80 as the "1977 Trinity". As the Apple II had the defining feature of being able to display color graphics, the Apple logo was redesigned to have a spectrum of colors.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II is the first model in the Apple II series, followed by Apple II+, Apple IIe, Apple IIc, and the 16-bit Apple IIGS—all of which remained compatible. Production of the last available model, Apple IIe, ceased in November 1993.


title: Apple II

text: By 1976, Steve Jobs had convinced product designer Jerry Manock (who had formerly worked at Hewlett Packard designing calculators) to create the "shell" for the Apple II—a smooth case inspired by kitchen appliances that concealed the internal mechanics. The earliest Apple II computers were assembled in Silicon Valley and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore. The first computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with an MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.022 MHz ( of the NTSC color carrier), two game paddles (bundled until 1980, when they were found to violate FCC regulations), 4 KiB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, uppercase-only text on the screen (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20 to 5F), with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor or on a regular TV set (by way of a separate RF modulator). The original retail price of the computer with 4 KiB of RAM was and with the maximum 48 KB of RAM. To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing had rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. Perhaps most significantly, the Apple II was a catalyst for personal computers across many industries; it opened the doors to software marketed at consumers.


title: Apple II

text: Certain aspects of the system's design were influenced by Atari's arcade video game "Breakout" (1976), which was designed by Wozniak, who said: "A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed "Breakout" for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now". This included his design of color graphics circuitry, the addition of game paddle support and sound, and graphics commands in Integer BASIC, with which he wrote "Brick Out", a software clone of his own hardware game. Wozniak said in 1984: "Basically, all the game features were put in just so I could show off the game I was familiar with—"Breakout"—at the Homebrew Computer Club. It was the most satisfying day of my life [when] I demonstrated "Breakout"—totally written in BASIC. It seemed like a huge step to me. After designing hardware arcade games, I knew that being able to program them in BASIC was going to change the world."


title: Apple II

text: In the May 1977 issue of "Byte", Steve Wozniak published a detailed description of his design; the article began, "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use, and inexpensive."


title: Apple II

text: The text and graphics screens have a complex arrangement. For instance, the scanlines were not stored in sequential areas of memory. This complexity was reportedly due to Wozniak's realization that the method would allow for the refresh of dynamic RAM as a side effect (as described above). This method had no cost overhead to have software calculate or look up the address of the required scanline and avoided the need for significant extra hardware. Similarly, in high-resolution graphics mode, color is determined by pixel position and thus can be implemented in software, saving Wozniak the chips needed to convert bit patterns to colors. This also allowed for subpixel font rendering, since orange and blue pixels appear half a pixel-width farther to the right on the screen than green and purple pixels.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II at first used data cassette storage, like most other microcomputers of the time. In 1978, the company introduced an external -inch floppy disk drive, called Disk II (stylized as Disk ][), attached through a controller card that plugs into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6). The Disk II interface, created by Wozniak, is regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components.


title: Apple II

text: The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations.


title: Apple II

text: The first production Apple II computers had hand-molded cases; these had visible bubbles and other lumps in them from the imperfect plastic molding process, which was soon switched to machine molding. In addition, the initial case design had no vent openings, causing high heat buildup from the PCB and resulting in the plastic softening and sagging. Apple added vent holes to the case within three months of production; customers with the original case could have them replaced at no charge.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II's printed circuit board (PCB) underwent several revisions, as Steve Wozniak made modifications to it. The earliest version was known as Revision 0, and the first 6,000 units shipped used it. Later revisions added a color killer circuit to prevent color fringing when the computer was in text mode, as well as modifications to improve the reliability of cassette I/O. Revision 0 Apple IIs powered up in an undefined mode and had garbage on-screen, requiring the user to press Reset. This was eliminated in later board revisions. Revision 0 Apple IIs could display only four colors in hi-res mode, but Wozniak was able to increase this to six hi-res colors on later board revisions.


title: Apple II

text: The PCB had three RAM banks for a total of 24 RAM chips. Original Apple IIs had jumper switches to adjust RAM size, and RAM configurations could be 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 36, or 48 KiB. The three smallest memory configurations used 4kx1 DRAMs, with larger ones using 16kx1 DRAMs, or mix of 4-kilobyte and 16-kilobyte banks (the chips in any one bank have to be the same size). The early Apple II+ models retained this feature, but after a drop in DRAM prices, Apple redesigned the circuit boards without the jumpers, so that only 16kx1 chips were supported. A few months later, they started shipping all machines with a full 48 KiB complement of DRAM.


title: Apple II

text: Unlike most machines, all integrated circuits on the Apple II PCB were socketed; although this cost more to manufacture and created the possibility of loose chips causing a system malfunction, it was considered preferable to make servicing and replacement of bad chips easier.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II PCB lacks any means of generating an interrupt request, although expansion cards may generate one. Program code had to stop everything to perform any I/O task; like many of the computer's other idiosyncrasies, this was due to cost reasons and Steve Wozniak assuming interrupts were not needed for gaming or using the computer as a teaching tool.


title: Apple II

text: Color on the Apple II series uses a quirk of the NTSC television signal standard, which made color display relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. The original NTSC television signal specification was black and white. Color was added later by adding a 3.58-megahertz subcarrier signal that was partially ignored by black-and-white TV sets. Color is encoded based on the "phase" of this signal in relation to a reference "color burst" signal. The result is, that the position, size, and intensity of a series of pulses define color information. These pulses can translate into "pixels" on the computer screen, with the possibility of exploiting composite artifact colors.


title: Apple II

text: The Apple II display provides two pixels per subcarrier cycle. When the color burst reference signal is turned on and the computer attached to a color display, it can display green by showing one alternating pattern of pixels, magenta with an opposite pattern of alternating pixels, and white by placing two pixels next to each other. Blue and orange are available by tweaking the pixel offset by half a pixel-width in relation to the color-burst signal. The high-resolution display offers more colors by compressing more (and narrower) pixels into each subcarrier cycle.


title: Apple II

text: The coarse, low-resolution graphics display mode works differently, as it can output a pattern of dots per pixel to offer more color options. These patterns are stored in the character generator ROM, and replace the text character bit patterns when the computer is switched to low-res graphics mode. The text mode and low-res graphics mode use the same memory region and the same circuitry is used for both.


title: Apple II

text: A single HGR page occupied 8 KiB of RAM; in practice this meant that the user had to have at least 12 KiB of total RAM to use HGR mode and 20 KiB to use two pages. Early Apple II games from the 1977–79 period often ran only in text or low-resolution mode in order to support users with small memory configurations; HGR not being near universally supported by games until 1980.


title: Apple II

text: Rather than a dedicated sound-synthesis chip, the Apple II has a toggle circuit that can only emit a click through a built-in speaker or a line-out jack; all other sounds (including two-, three- and, eventually, four-voice music and playback of audio samples and speech synthesis) are generated entirely by software that clicked the speaker at just the right times. Similar techniques are used for cassette storage: cassette output works the same as the speaker, and input is a simple zero-crossing detector that serves as a relatively crude (1-bit) audio digitizer. Routines in machine ROM encode and decode data in frequency-shift keying for the cassette.


title: Apple II

text: Initially, the Apple II was shipped with Integer BASIC encoded in the motherboard ROM chips. Written by Wozniak, the interpreter enabled users to write software applications without needing to purchase additional development utilities. Written with game programmers and hobbyists in mind, the language only supported the encoding of numbers in 16-bit integer format. Since it only supported integers between -32768 and +32767 (signed 16-bit integer), it was less suitable to business software, and Apple soon received complaints from customers. Because Steve Wozniak was busy developing the Disk II hardware, he did not have time to modify Integer BASIC for floating point support. Apple instead licensed Microsoft's 6502 BASIC to create Applesoft BASIC.


title: Apple II

text: Disk users normally purchased a so-called Language Card, which had Applesoft in ROM, and was sat below the Integer BASIC ROM in system memory. The user could switch between either BASIC by typing FP or INT in BASIC prompt. Apple also offered a different version of Applesoft for cassette users, which occupied low memory, and was started by using the LOAD command in Integer BASIC.


title: Apple II

text: As shipped, Apple II incorporated a machine code monitor with commands for displaying and altering the computer's RAM, either one byte at a time, or in blocks of 256 bytes at once. This enabled programmers to write and debug machine code programs without further development software. The computer powers on into the monitor ROM, displaying a * prompt. From there, Ctrl+B enters BASIC, or a machine language program can be loaded from cassette. Disk software can be booted with Ctrl+P followed by 6, referring to Slot 6 which normally contained the Disk II controller.


title: Apple II

text: A 6502 assembler was soon offered on disk, and later the UCSD compiler and operating system for the Pascal language were made available. The Pascal system requires a 16 KiB RAM card to be installed in the language card position (expansion slot 0) in addition to the full 48 KiB of motherboard memory.


title: Apple II

text: The first 1,000 or so Apple IIs shipped in 1977 with a 68-page mimeographed "Apple II Mini Manual", hand-bound with brass paper fasteners. This was the basis for the "Apple II Reference Manual," which became known as the Red Book for its red cover, published in January 1978. All existing customers who sent in their warranty cards, were sent free copies of the Red Book. The Apple II Reference Manual contained the complete schematic of the entire computer's circuitry, and a complete source listing of the "Monitor" ROM firmware that served as the machine's BIOS.


title: Apple II

text: An Apple II manual signed by Steve Jobs in 1980 with the inscription "Julian, your generation is the first to grow up with computers. Go change the world." sold at auction for $787,484 in 2021.


title: Apple II

text: The original Apple II provided an operating system in ROM along with a BASIC variant called Integer BASIC. The only form of storage available was cassette tape which was inefficiently slow and, worse, unreliable. In 1977 when Apple decided against the popular but clunky CP/M operating system for Wozniak's innovative disk controller design, it contracted Shepardson Microsystems for $13,000 to write an Apple DOS for the Apple II series. At Shepardson, Paul Laughton developed the crucial disk drive software in just 35 days, a remarkably short deadline by any standard. Apple's Disk II -inch floppy disk drive was released in 1978. The final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS 3.3.


title: Apple II

text: Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS, which supported a hierarchical filesystem and larger storage devices. With an optional third-party Z80-based expansion card, the Apple II could boot into the CP/M operating system and run WordStar, dBase II, and other CP/M software. With the release of MousePaint in 1984 and the Apple II in 1986, the platform took on the look of the Macintosh user interface, including a mouse.


title: Apple II

text: Apple released Applesoft BASIC in 1977, a more advanced variant of the language which users could run instead of Integer BASIC for more capabilities.


title: Apple II

text: Some commercial Apple II software booted directly and did not use standard DOS disk formats. This discouraged the copying or modifying of the software on the disks, and improved loading speed.


title: Apple II

text: When the Apple II initially shipped in June 1977, no expansion cards were available for the slots. This meant that the user did not have any way of connecting a modem or a printer. One popular hack involved connecting a teletype machine to the cassette output.


title: Apple II

text: Wozniak's open-architecture design and Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices, including peripheral cards, such as serial controllers, display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, networking components, and real-time clocks. There were plug-in expansion cards—such as the Z-80 SoftCard—that permitted Apple II to use the Z80 processor and run programs for the CP/M operating system, including the dBase II database and the WordStar word processor. The Z80 card also allowed the connection to a modem, and thereby to any networks that a user might have access to. In the early days, such networks were scarce. But they expanded significantly with the development of bulletin board systems in later years. There was also a third-party 6809 card that allowed OS-9 Level One to be run. Third-party sound cards greatly improved audio capabilities, allowing simple music synthesis and text-to-speech functions. Apple II accelerator cards doubled or quadrupled the computer's speed.


title: Apple II

text: Early Apple IIs were often sold with a Sup'R'Mod, which allowed the composite video signal to be viewed in a television.


title: Apple II

text: The Soviet Union radio-electronics industry designed Apple II-compatible computer Agat. Roughly 12,000 Agat 7 and 9 models were produced and they were widely used in Soviet schools. Agat 9 computers could run "Apple II" compatibility and native modes. "Apple II" mode allowed to run wider variety of (presumably pirated) Apple II software, but at the expense of less RAM. Because of that Soviet developers preferred native mode over "Apple II" compatibility mode.