Anna Richardovna
Anna Richardovna serves as the personal secretary to Prokhor Petrovich, the chairman of the Commission on Spectacles and Entertainment of the Lighter Type. She is described as a beautiful woman, and her position places her at the center of the commission's daily operations. On the Friday following the disastrous black magic seance at the Variety Theatre, she becomes the horrified witness to an event that shatters the normal order of her workplace.
The Incident with the Empty Suit
Anna Richardovna's ordeal begins when a black cat, huge as a behemoth, walks into the commission's offices. She shouts "scat" at it, and the cat leaves, but is immediately replaced by a fat man with a cat-like face. This visitor, who is in fact one of Woland's retinue, goes straight to Prokhor Petrovich's office. Anna Richardovna runs after him, shouting, but the intruder sits down opposite the chairman. Prokhor Petrovich, described by Anna Richardovna as a kind-hearted but edgy man who works like an ox, angrily demands to know why the man has barged in unannounced. The visitor replies that he has come to discuss a little business, and when Prokhor Petrovich insists he is busy, the man retorts, "You're not busy with anything." Losing his patience, Prokhor Petrovich shouts, "Get him out of here, devil take me!" The visitor smiles and says, "Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!" Before Anna Richardovna can scream, the cat-faced man vanishes, and in his place, sitting at the desk, is an empty suit. The suit is wearing a necktie, has a fountain pen in its pocket, but above the collar there is neither neck nor head, and no hands emerge from the sleeves. The suit immediately begins writing with a dry pen and, when addressed, speaks in Prokhor Petrovich's voice, haughtily insisting that he is not receiving visitors.
Aftermath and Despair
Anna Richardovna is utterly distraught. She is found by the bookkeeper Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin, who has come to the commission on business. She is lying in a leather armchair in the secretary's room, her head thrown back, sobbing unrestrainedly, a wet handkerchief in her hand. Her chin is smeared with lipstick, and black streams of sodden mascara run from her eyelashes down her peachy cheeks. When she sees the bookkeeper, she jumps up, rushes to him, clutches the lapels of his jacket, and shakes him, shouting that at last one brave man has been found. She drags him into the office, where the suit is still working. She shrieks and wrings her hands, crying out, "You see? You see?! He's not there! He's not! Bring him back, bring him back!" She hops around the bookkeeper, worrying his jacket, and exclaims that she always stopped Prokhor Petrovich when he swore by the devil, and now the devil has got him. Running to the writing desk, she calls out in a tender, musical voice, slightly nasal from weeping, "Prosha! Where are you!" The suit replies haughtily, asking who "Prosha" is to her. Anna Richardovna bursts into sobs, crying that he does not recognize her. When the suit angrily tells her not to sob in the office, she declares she cannot look at it and runs out, followed by the bookkeeper.
Narrative Role and Significance
Anna Richardovna's role is that of a terrified witness to the supernatural intrusion into the bureaucratic world. Her frantic, incoherent account to the bookkeeper provides the only detailed description of the transformation. She is a figure of pure, helpless distress, embodying the chaos that Woland's retinue sows in the official institutions of Moscow. Her desperate pleas and her inability to comprehend or cope with the event highlight the complete breakdown of normal, rational order in the face of the inexplicable. The incident she reports is one of the most striking and absurd examples of the novel's satire, in which the empty, soulless nature of Soviet officialdom is made literal: a man who is all function and no substance is reduced to his purest form, an empty suit that continues to perform its bureaucratic duties without a human being inside.
