due to his own art works, radically different from a social realism art style then dominant in the USSR. Some of his paintings were abstract and expressionistic, others were surrealistic, phantasmagorical. He experimented with the different shapes of the canvases (circles, triangles), and often embedded texts into his drawings and paintings. He also self-published a few book-like volumes, made of sketches, drawings and his own texts, often written in an enigmatic and expressive manner. “The world is very sick. No surprise that only the Artists can rescue it”, wrote he in one of such books. Kalmykov was often drawing on the streets and in the parks of Alma-Ata, and soon became a city legend because of his extravagant clothes (bright red beret, blue trousers with gold stripes, and a coat with the attached tin cans) and behavior. He was never selling his works, and only presented some of them to his friends and sometimes even to the strangers. Later years and death After his retirement in 1962 Kalmykov experienced increasing financial difficulties, ate very poorly (allegedly his food ratio the late years consisted only bread and milk, and he didn’t have warm meals for months). Purportedly he suffered from mental illnesses, but no diagnostics or treatment was conducted during his life (posthumously he was diagnosed with schizophrenia by some of the local psychiatrists). Shortly before his death Sergey Kalmykov was placed to a psychiatric clinic, where he died on April 27, 1967, from pneumonia aggravated by the extreme dystrophy. The place of his grave is not known. Commemoration and legacy The total volume of art-works by Sergey Kalmykov is estimated around 1,500 pieces, of different format, although the exact number is not known, and estimates vary widely. The Art Museum named after Abylkhan Kasteev in Alma-Ata has more than one thousand art works of the artist in its archives, the largest collection known. Dozens of works are possessed by the Russian Museum in St.Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Unknown number of Kalmykov’s works is also kept in various private collections, in Kazakhstan, Russia, the US, and Europe. The very first small exhibition of the art works by Sergey Kalmykov was held already in end of 1968, by the Art Gallery named after Taras Shevchenko in Alma-Ata (the gallery was later reorganized into the Art Museum named after Abylkhan Kasteev). In 1991 the Museum commemorated the 100th anniversary of