A small, awkward man squints from the numerous photographs that have survived. He began to lose sight while still in school. From the age of thirty he was already regularly in psychiatric hospitals. For the last thirty years of his 64, Yakovlev was almost blind by the standards of ordinary people. Books that he loved very much, friends read aloud to him, he himself could not. For a long time he even redrawn his own surname for signing from the sample so that it came out without errors. No workshop, no apartment of his own. Constantly under the care of caring people.