Strong-willed and eccentric, Anna was known for her cruelty and vulgar sense of humor. She forced Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn to become her court jester and had him married off to her unattractive Kalmyk maid Avdotya Buzheninova. To celebrate the wedding, the Empress had an ice palace measuring thirty-three feet high and eighty feet long built together with icy beds, steps, chairs, windows and even logs of ice in a fireplace of ice. Prince Golitsyn and his bride were placed in a cage atop an elephant and paraded through the streets to this structure, to spend their wedding night in the ice palace, despite it being an extremely cold night in the dead of winter. Empress Anna told the couple to make love and keep their bodies close if they did not wish to freeze to death. Eventually, the couple survived when the maid traded a pearl necklace for a sheepskin coat from one of the guards. An enthusiastic hunter, Anna always kept a rifle by her window so she could blast away at birds at all hours of the day whenever she felt the urge to hunt.