“Brainless beef!”

Count Aleksey Kirillovich Vronsky is entertaining “a foreign prince.” The count is not having a good time of it.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Also from this novel
“The turning point of summer” : Theory of dairy farming : Toothache : Anna meta

[I’m happy reading Garnett–Kent–Berberova, but this passage illustrates what I find an occasional problem in the translation: ambiguous pronoun reference. A character’s name would sometimes make the meaning immediately clear.]