red screens

“ ‘Snowball berries, how red they are!’ he whispered, not knowing why. Quietly, with careful, noiseless steps, he approached the window and stood on tiptoe. Before him lay the whole of Fyodor Pavlovich’s bedroom. It was a small room, divided all the way across by red screens, ‘Chinese,’ as Fyodor Pavlovich called them. ‘Chinese’ raced through Mitya’s mind, ‘and behind the screens—Grushenka.’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

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