The name of the famous Czech prose writer, laureate of the State Prize Jiri Marek (born .) in 1914 . ) familiar to the Soviet reader. The author has repeatedly appeared on the pages of our press .. His books of the 50s and 60s were translated into Russian: “Fighters Go at Night”, “The Village Under the Ground”, “Dawn Above Us”, “Young Fighters”, “Country Under the Equator”, “Little Dramas”; a collection of his selected satirical and humorous stories “Interesting Little Boy” was published. In Czechoslovakia, almost the most popular books of Marek were collections “Panopticum of old criminal stories” (1968), “Panopticum of sinners” (1971), “Panopticum of the City of Prague” (1979). Although many of the detective stories of these collections are based on old “court reports” and archival documents, the writer expressed his attitude to life here. The material allowed him to “pull off the edge of fantasy”, and the time distance opened up the possibility of combining tragedy with humor and some objective lyricism. He is also present in another, no less popular work by Marek, the novel My Uncle Odysseus (1974), where the author, as it were, revives family photos. In four songs of this parody, iroicic epic, the writer tells about the adventures of the former chairman of the funeral home association Joseph Freivald, who shares a rich life experience with his grandnephew. The wise and ironic view of the author, which does not coincide with the life concepts of the characters, gives a capacious and multifaceted satire of the writer as if the fourth dimension. In recent years, Jiri Marek has worked on an extensive epic novel covering the history of the Czech Republic from the end of the 19th century to May 1945. His first two volumes, entitled Salt of the Earth, were published in 1981, the last, The Time of Love and Hate, in 1986. In the same years, the book "The Dog Star Sirius, or the Praised Word to the Dog" (1982) was written.