In August 1697, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great arrived incognito in Zaandam (Saardam), Netherlands, as part of his Grand Embassy diplomatic mission, spending several days working as a ship's carpenter and studying the advanced wind-powered sawmill and shipbuilding industries that made the Dutch fleet supreme. He subsequently spent four months at the Amsterdam dockyards before moving to England's Deptford shipyard. Peter's firsthand observation of wind-powered industrial technology was a catalyst for his ambitious modernisation programme, which would transform Russia into a major European naval and commercial power within a generation.

Peter the Great's westernising reforms — partly inspired by his Zaandam experience — had enormous consequences for Russian literary culture, accelerating the adoption of secular, European literary forms and eventually creating the conditions for the emergence of modern Russian poetry. Alexander Pushkin, who later celebrated and critiqued the Petrine legacy in poems like The Bronze Horseman (1833), located Russia's modern literary identity in tension with Peter's forced transformation. The Dutch windmill thus stands obliquely at the origin of the Russian literary tradition's defining national myth.