In 1912, Constance Garnett released her first major translation of Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov; within the next nine years she would translate nearly the complete body of his fiction. During the year that marked Dostoevsky's triumphant entry, or more precisely, re-entry, into England's literary marketplace, the winds of modernism blew strong across Europe. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky labored in Paris on Rite of Spring, a ballet celebration of pagan ritual that would provoke a near-riot when premiered in 1913. The unresolved dissonances and harsh, shifting rhythms of Stravinksy's music assaulted traditional expectations. Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev's startling production of the ballet further discomforted the audience by its perpetual motion and asymmetry. During the first night's performance the lead dancer, the famed Nijinsky, had to clap the rhythm on stage because the orchestra could not be heard over the objections of the audience. In Berlin, the Austrian-born Arnold Schönberg challenged fundamental musical structures and dispensed with tonal organization entirely. His 1912 composition Pierrot Lunaire, vocal arrangements with chamber accompaniment, marked a further step in his revolutionary new direction.

In the visual arts, the Russian Wassily Kandinksy published a treatise in Munich, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” that explained his need to move beyond representational art. According to W. H. Jansen, Kandinsky's aim “was to charge form and color with a purely spiritual meaning (as he put it) by eliminating all resemblance to the physical world.” Pablo Picasso experimented in Paris with collage Cubism.