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Russia and Hungary, in their different ways, present complex models of reception to the investigator of inter-cultural traffic. In 1825, Pushkin represented Peter the Great’s visionary resolve as a determination ‘to cut a window through to Europe’.1 With this line the Russian poet, wittingly or unwittingly, set an agenda that all those who came after him felt obliged to follow. By the end of the nineteenth century, some Russian authors and authorities were advocating a protective strategy of assimilation, while others preferred to shelter behind a fabricated Eurasian identity for their country. Located precariously in Europe and yet receptive to the pull of the Orient, Russian writers saw one of their main tasks as being to act as a bridge between East and West. A preoccupation with what lay to the East went hand in hand with a conviction among the more progressive that it was imperative to follow the Petrine project, as Pushkin had delineated it, and open up to the West. A similar debate was held in Hungary. Sandor Petofi, whose position as ‘national poet’ is analogous to Pushkin’s, laid the foundations for a self-examination that was both individual and collective. His resonant call for ‘world liberty’ (vilagszabadsag) in the poem ‘One thought torments me’ placed his country securely at the centre of a comprehensive vision. Referring to the time of liberation for enslaved nations, he wrote (in Edwin Morgan’s translation)

The 'vague expanse' of the wilderness defines the outer limits of the city; alternatively, the city walls mark out an enclosure where the 'political' community dwells and which excludes the 'nomadic' inhabitants who surround it. Such a distinction has been applied recently in Translation Studies to describe the difference between a text in its source culture and a translation in a target culture. In particular, Polysystem Theory, developed over a number of years by Itamar Even-Zohar and others, draws upon a contrast between centre and periphery postulated in the critical work of the Russian Formalists to provide a spatial model that fits Deleuze and Guattari's description of the opposition between polis and nomos. For the French commentators, 'language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital' (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7). For Even-Zohar the centre functions in a similar fashion as a point of convergence for various interacting systems while the periphery constitutes the diametrically opposed 'backcountry'. Essentially, in fact, the polysystem can be said to be a polis-system. But Even-Zohar's is by no means the only possible model of this type. A contrasting approach is presented by the Catalan author Joaquim Mallafre, in a book written from the perspective of his