This article presents a scholarly biography of Margarita Kozhina (1925–2012), the founder of the well-known Perm School of Stylistics and professor at Perm State University. She developed the theory of functional stylistics, which revealed and described the regularities of stylistic differentiation in literary Russian. In the early 1960s, Kozhina was one of the first researchers in Russian linguistics to study issues of language functioning and form a new scholarly direction, namely speech studies. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, she defined the main categories of functional stylistics. The latter was regarded as the most important component of speech studies. Kozhina’s papers organically entered the episteme of the second half of the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. They marked the turn of linguistics from the system-structural paradigm of studying language to the functional one. Kozhina developed the stylistic-statistical method of speech analysis. A statistical survey of the linguistic side of functional styles allowed her to make conclusions about the interaction of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in speech. Kozhina authored more than 200 scholarly publications, including 8 monographs and the first Russian textbook on Russian-language stylistics. She was a member of the International Committee of Slavists and the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Stylistyka (Poland) and Styl (Serbia). The article describes Kozhina both as a prominent theorist and a remarkable organiser of scholarship. She initiated 20 collections of academic works on stylistics, some international conferences, a three-volume collective monograph on the history of Russian scholarly style from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the first Stylistic Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Russian Language (a compendium of knowledge on functional stylistics). The author describes Margarita Kozhina as a talented researcher and an unusually strong personality, who managed, having overcome dramatic circumstances, to make an important contribution to European studies of language.