The collected works of Waclaw Michalski in 10 volumes included the novels “17 Left Boots”, “Secret Favors”, the stories “Katenka”, “The Ballad of the Old Weapon”, well-known to a wide range of readers and moviegoers, as well as other novels and short stories that have passed the test time. A significant part of the collected works is occupied by a cycle of six novels about the daughters of the admiral of the Russian Imperial Navy Maria and Alexander Merzlovsky, a cycle of novels that formed the epic “Spring in Carthage”, covering the entire 20th century, life in old and new Russia, in the USSR, in the Russian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe and the USA. The first volume of the collected works includes stories and tales known to readers from publications in the magazines “Friendship of Peoples”, “October”, as well as “The Chosen One” by Vaclav Michalsky (M.: Soviet Writer , 1986). As an afterword, the volume is accompanied by an article by Valentin Petrovich Kataev “The Gift of Imagination”, first published as parting words for the mass publication (3.5 million copies) of Vaclav Michalsky’s stories “The Ballad of the Old Weapon”, “Katenka”, “The Stove” (Roman-newspaper "No. 908. 1980).