Nabokov’s is an early portrayal of the challenge provided by the interaction between writer (since it was based on his own experience) and organization, in spite of Nabokov’s relatively privileged position as a white male cashing in on American anti-Communism and Europhilia. Since then, with the triumph of neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War, the conflict between artist and institution has only grown stronger. There is an ever greater expansion of the bureaucratic demands made by institutions on writers in exchange for a salary as well as an insistent pressure to professionalize that makes Pnin’s cantankerousness or saccharine outbursts quite unimaginable in a contemporary setting.

Unless teaching at one of a few select places, writers are increasingly required, apart from their teaching duties, to attend meetings, serve on committees and be on email 24/7. They are also expected, in an era when students are customers, the university a brand and everything a matter of opinion, often to put aside whatever knowledge and expertise they might have acquired in order to assuage the varying sensibilities of their customers. Otherwise, as in the case of the poetry professor in Wisconsin attacked for teaching material with L.G.B.T. content, one might be taken to court in order for an F to be changed to an A.

Is there any time left for writing after this? Not much, unless the writer manages to find a grant, of which there are few around, most of them likely to favor those already quite successful. Even in Britain, whose elite universities were once home to elbow-patched, tweed-jacketed writers never burdened with the expectation of production — E. M. Forster famously spent more than two decades as an honorary fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, without ever publishing another novel — technocratic administrators have managed to extend their control over writers to a dispiriting degree.

The writer Marina Warner depicted a few years ago, in two devastating pieces for The London Review of Books, the resulting conflict in artists trying to live in two worlds — “at the university and in a room of their own.” Her account, of quitting a once prestigious position at Essex University, features an ex-military vice chancellor, a centralized system of evaluation called REF (“Research Excellence Framework”) and a “Tariff of Expectations,” reminders that the dystopian future is already here and has been around for some time.

“Outside grants are becoming the only way to earn time off to write,” Warner notes. They remain so for many. I know that I remember with gratitude every organization that has given me a grant for my writing — the Society of Authors, the Radcliffe Institute and the Howard Foundation at Brown. Such grants amount to more than money; they represent a shared vision in an idea, a project, a faith in the very act of one’s withdrawing to a room to work on a book. Yet they can’t change the fact of applying for them being a gamble, or the truth that we live in a world where teaching institutions increasingly demand more and more, until one might exclaim, with Pnin, that one has nofing left for one’s writing.