Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray

Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray was a respectable and very practical fifty-year-old widow who owned the six-storey, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street in Moscow. She was the original proprietor of Apartment No. 50, which would later become infamous as the residence of the late Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and the director of the Variety Theatre, Stepan Likhodeev, and which ultimately served as the Moscow headquarters for the demonic Woland and his retinue. Her unexplained disappearance, preceded by a series of mysterious vanishings among her tenants and household staff, established the apartment's uncanny reputation long before the arrival of the black magician.

Ownership and the Strange Reputation of Apartment No. 50

Two years before the novel's main events, Anna Frantsevna owned Apartment No. 50 and let out three of its five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and another whose name had been lost. The apartment soon gained a strange reputation when people began to disappear from it without a trace. On a Monday, a policeman came to the apartment and called the second lodger out to the front hall, saying he was invited to the police station for a minute to sign something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna's long-time and devoted housekeeper, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He never returned, and the policeman evidently vanished along with him. The pious, or more frankly superstitious, 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, though she would not talk about it towards night-time. That Wednesday, Belomut also disappeared: a car came to take him to work as usual, but it did not bring him back or return itself. Madame Belomut's grief and horror defied description, but that same night, on returning with Anfisa from her dacha, Anna Frantsevna found that the wife of citizen Belomut was also gone, and the doors of the Belomut couple's two rooms were sealed.

Disappearance and Aftermath

After two days of suffering from insomnia, Anna Frantsevna again left hurriedly for her dacha and never came back. Left alone, Anfisa wept her fill and went to sleep past one o'clock in the morning. Lodgers in other apartments reported hearing knocking all night in No. 50 and seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning. By morning, Anfisa had also vanished. Legends circulated in the house about the disappearances and the accursed apartment, including a story that the dry and pious Anfisa had supposedly carried on her breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to Anna Frantsevna, and that in the woodshed of the very dacha to which Anna Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus gold coins of tsarist minting. The apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week before the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and Likhodeev with his wife. Within a month, both wives vanished as well, continuing the pattern of strange disappearances that had begun under Anna Frantsevna's ownership.