Andrei Yefimych Ragin

The protagonist of "Ward No. 6": a learned, indolent hospital director in a provincial town who has rationalized the hospital's squalor and his own inaction with a philosophy of resignation and indifference to suffering. His growing intellectual intimacy with the patient Ivan Dmitrich Gromov scandalizes the town; his rivals maneuver him out of his post and eventually have him committed to the ward himself, where a beating by the orderly Nikita gives him, for the first time, a visceral understanding of the suffering he had only theorized about. He dies shortly after of a stroke.