Short answers, pulled from the story.
Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk in 1924 in honor of Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, who was born in the city in 1870 and died in 1924. The renaming followed his death and was a Soviet act of commemoration.
Ulyanovsk has been Russia's only UNESCO City of Literature since 2015. No other Russian city holds this designation.
The boyar Bogdan Khitrovo founded Simbirsk in 1648. The fort was built on a hill on the western bank of the Volga River to protect the eastern frontier of the Tsardom of Russia from nomadic tribes.
Vladimir Lenin, Alexander Kerensky, the novelist Ivan Goncharov, the historian Nikolay Karamzin, the physicist and dissident Andrey Sakharov, and the figure skating champion Ludmila Belousova were all born in the city. Lenin and Kerensky were on opposing sides of the October Revolution of 1917.
The Kuybyshev plant, completed in 1957 some 200 km downstream, flooded significant land around Ulyanovsk and widened the Volga by up to 35 km in some places. Parts of the city still sit below the reservoir's water level and are protected only by a dam.
The President Bridge is a truss bridge across the Volga with a total length of 5.5 km, making it one of the longest bridges in Europe. Construction began in the late 1980s and was delayed by post-Soviet economic conditions; Russian President Dmitry Medvedev officially opened it on the 24th of November 2009.