Anfisa

Anfisa is the long-time, devoted housekeeper of Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray in the ill-fated Apartment No. 50 on Sadovaya Street. She is a pious and superstitious woman who becomes the last known occupant of the apartment before its string of mysterious disappearances, and her own vanishing marks the final stage of the apartment's malignant reputation.

Identity and Role

Anfisa served as the faithful housekeeper to Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, the respectable and practical fifty-year-old widow who owned Apartment No. 50. The narrator describes her as "pious, or, to speak more frankly, superstitious." When the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) disappeared along with the policeman who had come to fetch him, Anfisa declared outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery and that she knew perfectly well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman, only she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time. This characterization establishes her as someone who perceives the supernatural dimension of the apartment's events but is reluctant to articulate it.

The Disappearances and Her Final Night

After the second lodger vanished on a Monday and the lodger Belomut disappeared that Wednesday, Anna Frantsevna, who had suffered all the while from insomnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha and never came back. Left alone, Anfisa, having wept her fill, went to sleep past one o'clock in the morning. What happened to her after that is not known, but lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of knocking all night in Apartment No. 50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning. In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa. Her disappearance, following the pattern of the others, completes the cycle of vanishings that had begun with the second lodger and the policeman.

Legends and Aftermath

For a long time all sorts of legends were repeated in the house about these disappearances and about the accursed apartment. One such legend held that "this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried on her dried-up breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to Anna Frantsevna." Another claimed that in the woodshed of that very dacha to which Anna Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves, some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus some gold coins of tsarist minting. The narrator, however, declines to vouch for these stories, noting: "Well, what we don't know, we can't vouch for." The apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week before the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and Styopa Likhodeev also with his wife, after which the malignant reputation continued with the disappearance of both wives.

Narrative Significance

Anfisa functions as a threshold figure in the novel's supernatural economy. Her superstitious recognition of sorcery, her reluctance to name it, and her silent disappearance establish the pattern of inexplicable vanishings that defines Apartment No. 50 before Woland and his retinue take up residence there. The legends that spring up around her—involving diamonds, treasure, and sorcery—prefigure the later, more spectacular interventions of the demonic forces. Her fate remains unknown, but the knocking and lights reported by neighbors suggest that whatever force operated in the apartment was active on the night she vanished, making her the last ordinary human witness to the apartment's pre-Woland phase of activity.