"Any choice is right as long as it's willed. That's the truth of the matter."
Artemy Burakh, the Haruspex, is one of Pathologic's three main characters and healers. He's one of the three player characters in Pathologic 1, and as of writing this, he is the only player character in Pathologic 2. Artemy is almost the complete opposite of Daniil Dankovsky, the other adult healer. He's not as much of an outsider, rather, he was born and raised in the Town-on-Gorkhon, and left the town as a teenager in order to study modern medicine elsewhere. He is a part of the Kin, as well as a Menkhu, someone within Kin culture who 'knows the lines' and is permitted to cut into bodies. Artemy's story begins when he is summoned back to town by his father, Isidor Burakh, only to discover that Isidor has been murdered, and he himself has been blamed. Not only that, but a danger his father warned him about, the plague, is soon to hit the town.
Artemy as a person is interesting to me. My reading of him is as a person who has been forced into genuinely horrific choices by his situation, but is a good person at his core. He's determined to clear his name and to live up to the legacy his father left to him. Both as a surgeon and as someone living in the town, Artemy aims to stop the plague by way of creating a panacea to cure the infected. He's someone who wants to do what will help the people suffering from the plague, unfortunately, even if he has to dirty his hands to do so. Both in the first and second Pathologic game, all of Artemy's bound are children, and in Pathologic 2, the ending sees him adopt two of them. Both of these certainly contribute to the idea of Artemy as a caring individual despite the reputation of 'The Ripper' placed onto him.
I love Artemy! Like nearly every character in the game, he's a complicated and frequently morally gray individual, but he feels to me like the most compassionate of the three healers. It's a litle hard for me to play him, (skill issue) as his route is absolutely the hardest out of the three. You start the game after surviving an attempted murder from three different guys. Yikes on bikes! That being said, Artemy's story is the closest of the three to a proper hero's journey. In all honestly, in the bleak and screwed up world of Pathologic, Artemy is the closest thing there is to a real hero. Just repeating what I said on Daniil's page, but whatever the two of them have going on is weird and strange and bizarre and I enjoy it. It's a very fun dynamic.