Margarita Nikolaevna Kozhina (1925-2012) - a famous Russian scholar, creator of the theory of functional stylistics, one of the founders of speech as the most important direction of modern communicative linguistics, organizer of the Perm stylistic school. Selected works cover the stages of the formation and development of Russian stylistics from the 60s of the XX century. to the first decade of the XXI century. The theoretical positions of the author are correlated with a dynamic approach to speech, the study of the laws of language functioning in different areas of communication. Many tasks set by M.N. Kozhina and the ideas expressed by her have not yet been developed in speech and require the efforts of new generations of researchers.