The topic is dictated by the desire to make more accessible material on the history and lingospecific Russian advertising. The texts of I. T. Kokorev may be useful to specialists exploring the history of Russian literature in the field of mass communication. Appeal to this material introduces the unique texts of the witness and shows the formation of speech features. Kokorev began by writing small notes in the Moskvityanin magazine (1841-1856), and then turned to everyday essays. The creativity of the writer and features of advertising texts are considered in the context of the official views of the magazine “Moskvityanin” (1841-1856). The magazine was the mouthpiece of the “official nationality” in the Russian cultural space. This had an impact on the literary style, manner of presentation and personal relation of I. T. Kokorev to his own texts and subjects. The material is considered in the historical and cultural context of the middle of the XIX century, based on the methods of philological hermeneutics, which studies the text-monument that is distant from us as a historical, cultural and linguistic phenomenon. Advertising texts are considered through the microcontext prism, which allows drawing attention to the structure of the essay, the author’s language, graphic presentation of verbal material, value judgments, the construction of advertising messages.