Although it starts at an earlier period and ends on the eve of the Great Reforms, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649-1861 by Elise Kimmerling Wirtschafter is a good place to start for the larger historiographic debates as Wirtschafter's book synthesizes historiography and its various debates when examining serfdom. Another text to examine is David Moon's The Russian Peasantry 1600 – 1930: The World the Peasants Made which examines the peasantry across various breakages and ruptures in Russian history.

For Post-Emancipation, Christine D. Worobec Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post - Emancipation Period is another fine book to consult. For education, both When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 by Jeffrey Brooks and Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 by Ben Eklof cover a lot of ground. The thorny issue of peasant religion is examined in Chris J. Chulos's Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861 –1917. Finally, the anthology Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia edited by Mark Steinberg and Stephen Frank examines the rough and often incomplete transition of peasantry into the lower classes of the late imperial period.

Moon is good (and a great guy). The classics are Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia; Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate; (if you read French) Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle; (if you read Russian) Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar'; Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seigniorialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750-1830,” The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (December 1, 1990): 676–708; and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. If you are interested in the economic aspect, don't miss Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout, and Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization.