“The Diary of a Hospital Security Guard” - a new book by Russian Booker Prize winner Oleg Pavlov, author of the novels “A State Tale” and “Asystole” - continues his piercing confessional prose. This is a chronicle of the emergency department of an ordinary Moscow hospital. Exactly one hundred years passed between Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the House of the Dead” and Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories,” and it is easy to guess, comparing the data of these two control points, what path Russian society took, in which direction it was moving... From Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” to “The Diary” hospital security guard" Oleg Pavlov - the distance is only half a century.