This article is a response to Daniela Tinková’s study Enlightenment as ‘vernacularization of knowledge’. In the first part we comment on the positive aspects of Tinková’s conception of the history of the Enlightenment, but also on the lack of clarity concerning the nature of knowledge as both a component of cultural transfer and the outcome of that process. The second part changes perspective, focussing on ‘the transfer of Enlightenment’ and the ‘radiation’ of Enlightenment from the Czech Lands to surrounding regions of the Habsburg monarchy, especially Galicia. For this reason the Czech Lands assumed a regional hegemony in many areas of administration and economic and intellectual life. We also attempt to explain the motivations for accepting ‘Enlightenment knowledge’ while relativizing the power asymmetries in these processes.
After the First Partition of Poland, another crown land - Galicia (German: Galizien, Polish: Galicja, Ukrainian: Halychyna) was incorporated into the Austrian Empire; it covered current south-Polish and western-Ukrainian territories north of the Carpathians in the basin of the Vistula to Upper Dniester and Prut. Galicia featured not only a variety of ethnic groups living in it (Polish, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Armenians, etc.), but also a diversity in religions. The above-mentioned ethnic and religious differences were reflected in the cultural sphere whose richness of expressions drew attention of the first collectors of folk traditions among domestic authors and foreign researchers, whereby Balthasar Hacquet (1739–1815) can be mentioned as the first of them. The interest of researchers whose attention was directed rather to the National Revival and who saw in the folk culture the roots of national self-identity was based on different ideological premises. It was Pavel Josef Šafařík (1795–1861) who became the representative of Slavic ethnography and who - in cooperation with the Ukrainian (Malorossian) scholars Ivan D. Vahylevych and Jakov Holovacki - offered knowledge about Ukrainian (Ruthenian) culture in eastern Galicia. Karel František Vladislav Zap (1812–1871) was among significant Czech experts in Galicia; as a public servant he lived in Lviv at the turn of the 1830s and 1840s. His work features an effort for a critical but unbiased attitude to ethnical and economic problems of the country. The freer social life in Austria after the fall of Bach’s absolutism lead to the development of journalism. The ethnographic work of František Řehoř (1857–1899), who spent several years in the region, is of essential importance for Galicia. He published his essays, mostly of a popularizing nature, in Prague social and professional journals. His strengths included gathering of source material through field research, and collecting activities. The last important chapter of contact between Ukrainians from Galicia and the Czech lands dates back to the 1890s; it is connected with large exhibitions held in Prague and Lviv. However, the political situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire caused their reception to be diametrically opposed. World War I, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the formation of the successor states ended the flow of ethnographic journalism on Galicia for the Czech reader; the Czech-Ukrainian contacts continued, however, on a different basis.