Introduction. Kalmyk Russian-language drama begins its countdown from the beginning of this century. It has not been the object and subject of the research by Russian literary criticism, which explains the relevance and novelty of this article. The purpose of the article is to present the phenomenon of the Kalmyk Russian-language drama in personalities and representative works, to identify the genre paradigm, to reveal national identity, to study folklore tradition, poetics of plays. The research materials are based on representative plays by Kalmyk playwrights, including unpublished ones, from the authors’ personal archive. The method of descriptive poetics is used to analyze texts. Results. Kalmyk Russian-language drama is represented by four authors of the older generation, members of writers’ unions, and one author of the younger generation, who has not yet been accepted into the Writers’ Union. Some of the plays have been published, some have not, and they are in the authors personal archives. A number of plays have been staged in the theaters of Kalmykia. In terms of genre, the works mostly differ both in the work of one playwright and in the literary process: musical, dramatic poem, legend, fairy tale, comedy, historical drama, drama, etc. The thematic range is wide: history and modernity. National identity in most plays is expressed in different ways. In the literary process, there is no longer the opposition of “one’s own / another’s” works created in Kalmyk or Russian languages, as in the 1960s and 1970s in the Kalmyk Russian-language poetry.