: Citing classics in Bibliography I need to cite in my paper various "classic" works (Russian writers of the XIX century etc). In the text it is relevant to specify the year of the original

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Under MLA, the year used in a citation is the date of publication for the work you're citing, not the original year of the work in question.

The reason for this is because a number of things could change between different publications: different forewords, translations, prefaces, grammar and spelling changes ...

The example format for your book would be something like:

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, and Constance
Garnett. The Karamazov Brothers.
Ware, England: Wordsworth Classics,
2010. Print.

(If it helps, I use www.easybib.com/ for generating bibliographic references and citations.)

Update: Sorry, forgot to add. MLA uses (Author Page) for in-text citations if I'm not mistaken. If you want to use (Author, Year), it should be year published, not the original year first published.

Another Update: Last one, I promise! In your example, you appear to want to show the year it was first published as a fact, not as an in-text citation, so you're better off writing something like:

Dostoyevsky, in his 'The Brothers
Karamazov', first published in 1879,
[..]

Or alternatively:

Dostoyevsky, in his 'The Brothers
Karamazov' (first published in 1879),
[..]

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