1. A forensic discussion of this debate, which examines the views of both contemporaries and subsequent historians alongside the available evidence, is presented in: Aleksandr M. Sharymov, Predystoriia Sankt-Peterburga. 1703 god. Kniga issledovanii (St Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2004), Book 2, Part 2, 493–710.
2. Russia’s historical claim to the territory that it conquered during the Great Northern War was formally established in Petr Shafirov, A Discourse Concerning the Just Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia: 1700–1721, ed. and trans. William E. Butler (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1973). This justification can be seen in other eighteenth-century accounts of the city’s foundation. See, for example: Andrei I. Bogdanov, Opisanie Sanktpeterburga, 1749–1751 (St Petersburg: Academy of Sciences Press, 1779), 30–32.
3. The elements within this mythology are discussed critically in: Wladimir Berelowitch and Olga Medvedkova, Histoire de Saint-Pétersbourg (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1996), 22–27 and
4. Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 201–211.
5. “There, by the billows desolate, / He stood, with mighty thoughts elate, / And gazed; but in the distance only / A sorry skiff on the broad spate / Of Neva drifted seaward, lonely. / The moss-grown miry banks with rare / Hovels were dotted here and there / Where wretched Finns for shelter crowded; / The murmuring woodlands had no share / Of sunshine, all in mist beshrouded.” Aleksandr S. Pushkin, The Bronze Horse, trans. Waclaw Lednicki (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1955), 140.