About the book : 2006 / The collection contains memoirs of peasant memoirists of the late 18th - first half of the 19th centuries, allowing one to see Russian life of that time from an unusual angle and understand what representatives of the most numerous and least known class of Russian society were thinking about and what they were striving for. This is the first an attempt to collect the memories of peasants under one cover, and some of the memoirs are generally published for the first time, and the rest (with the exception of two) have never been republished.