The internationally recognized classic of Czech literature of the 20th century, Bohumil Hrabal, began to be published only in the 1960s, although back in 1959, a collection of his stories “Lark on a String” about the forced re-education of irresponsible members of society on the construction site of socialism was banned from publication. This stage in the writer’s work was still little known to the Russian reader; meanwhile, it originates much of what was developed in such mature works of Hrabal as the novels “I Served the English King” and “Too Noisy Loneliness.” The proposed book includes a story and stories from three of Hrabal’s early collections. These are “The Pearl at the Bottom” (1963) and “Pabiteli” (1964) with a neologism in the title, with which the author first designated the type of “idle philosophers”, inventors and eccentrics that were then frequent in his works, as well as “Announcement for the sale of a house in which I no longer want to live" (1965).