The second volume of collected works includes the novel “Seventeen Left Boots” (1964–1966), which was first published by the Dagestan Book Publishing House in 1967. This was the first novel of the young prose writer, but it already carried such generic features of Vaclav’s prose Michalsky, as a rich, precise Russian language, a masterful combination of narrative and visual, the ability to recreate, seemingly on inconspicuous everyday material, the spiritual characters of living people, snatched, one might say, from the “extras.” Only in 1980 the novel was published by the Sovremennik publishing house. . “Vaclav Michalski immediately attracted the attention of readers and critics with the freshness of his extraordinary talent,” Valentin Kataev wrote about him at the same time. What the famous master said, although flattering for the author, did not entirely correspond to reality. Many thousands of readers read the novel “Seventeen Left Boots” with unflagging interest, but there was no criticism at all: neither for nor against. There was only a figure of silence. And now it's clear. As Lev Anninsky recently wrote about the novel “Seventeen Left Boots”: “To connect together two “captivities”, two camps, two versions of barbed wire: Stalin’s and Hitler’s - for the censorship of that time this was an outrageous audacity, unthinkable!”