Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 on marshland at the Neva River's mouth, creating a 'window to Europe' that symbolized Russia's westernization ambitions. Built by conscripted laborers under brutal conditions, the city became Russia's capital in 1712 and a showcase for European-style architecture, culture, and administration. Peter's reforms aimed to modernize Russia by importing Western technology, customs, and institutional models.

St. Petersburg became a powerful symbol in Russian literature, representing both European enlightenment and artificial imposition on Russian soil. Pushkin's Bronze Horseman explored tensions between imperial ambition and individual suffering embodied in the city's founding. Dostoevsky and Gogol used Petersburg's foggy, surreal atmosphere to examine alienation and madness. The city's planned geometry versus organic Russian traditions created literary metaphors for modernity's disruptions, influencing Russian poetry's engagement with progress, identity, and social transformation.