Belliustin, I. S. Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest. Translated with an interpretive essay by Gregory L. Freeze. Cornell University Press, 1985. ISBN: 9780801417962. [Preview with Google Books] (Superb source on the state of the church, spiritual life, and rural Russia.)
Engelgardt, Aleksandr Nikolaevich. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt's Letters from the Country, 1872–1887. Translated and edited by Cathy A. Frierson. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780195076219.
Gorshkov, Boris B., ed. A Life Under Russian Serfdom: The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800–1868. Central European University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9789637326158.
MacKay, John, trans., and ed. Four Russian Serf Narratives. University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780299233747. [Preview with Google Books]
Rostislavov, Dmitrii Ivanovich. Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son. Translated and edited by Alexander M. Martin. Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780875802855.
Tian-Shanskaia, Olga Semyonova. Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia. Edited by David L. Ransel. Indiana University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780253207845. [Preview with Google Books] (Ethnographer's grim account of the backwardness of the countryside.)