His first personal exhibition was a one-day exhibition, organized cartridges together with E. A. Steinberg in the Dostoyevsky Museum in 1963, and foreign debut - exhibition of Russian avant-garde in today's Moscow "in the Gallery Gmurzhinska (Cologne, 1970). A lot of time spent in psychiatric hospitals, constantly suffering from serious ailments, in the first place - the progressive decline of vision.

He wrote mostly in gouache on paper, preferring discreet, cool tone. Passed through passion-objective painting, was influenced by Picasso, for reasons that sometimes reproduce (Cat with bird in his mouth, 1973, Museum "Other Art" at Rossiyskom University for the Humanities). Ripe things Yakovlev created in line with the "new figuration" of the postwar avant-garde currents, returning from abstraction to the subject, but the subject is treated with a new tragic intensity. His portraits, still lifes, as well as the famous Yakovlevskij "flowers" (just as melancholy and lonely, like his characters) is a lyrical confession of his intense dramatic expression (Collector LP Talochkin, 1973; Flowers 1973 and 1974; ibid). Forming homogeneous plots cycles, pictures and lists Yakovlev collectively composed of a continuous "stream" beautiful mind, trying to break through the limits of approaching blindness (in the later period of the artist work, pulling a person very close to the colorful surface).
During the period of adjustment at the turn of 1980-1990's, the press campaign was launched to establish a public guardianship of the artist (with the assistance of funds from the sale of his works) - in order to create optimal conditions for its creation. These plans partly realized, but Yakovlev then spent a brief period.

Yakovlev died in Moscow on October 10, 1998.
Works in the gallery "Movies" http://www.gallerykino.ru/artists.php?id=41