And thus he mused: “From here, indeed
Shall we strike terror in the Swede;
And here a city, by our labor
Founded, shall gall our haughty neighbor;
‘Here cut’—so Nature gives command—
‘Your window through on Europe: stand
Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!’ ”

These lines come from Pushkin’s narrative poem "The Bronze Horseman" (1833), set against the founding of St. Petersburg and the catastrophic flood of 1824. In the poem’s opening, Pushkin evokes Peter the Great standing on the Neva’s marshy banks, envisioning a new city that will project Russian power toward Europe and challenge Sweden—Russia’s rival in the Baltic during the era of the Great Northern War. The passage frames St. Petersburg as an act of imperial will and state-building, created through labor and conquest of nature, before the poem turns to the later human cost embodied in the fate of the clerk Evgeny.

Pushkin presents Peter’s founding vision as both triumphant and ominous. The city is imagined as a strategic weapon—meant to “strike terror” in Sweden and to “gall” a proud neighbor—while also serving as Russia’s “window through on Europe,” a symbol of modernization and outward orientation. Yet the command to “cut” a window suggests violence done to geography and to existing ways of life: nature is forced to yield, and the state’s grand design is imposed on an unstable landscape. In the poem’s larger arc, this exalted imperial perspective is later counterweighted by the vulnerability of ordinary individuals when nature (the flood) and power collide.