The article is devoted to the problem of cultural resistance and modernization of Ukrainian national identity in the conditions of intensification of imperial grip in the post-UNR period, after national revolution. It deals with the strategies of coexistence with the winners, which were developed in the community of neoclassics in Kyiv, about the preservation of cultural sovereignty while demonstrating political loyalty to the regime. The concept of cultural resistance is interpreted with the additional analytical tools of post-colonial studies and memory studies. Neoclassicists, especially Mykola Zerov, focused on the Europe centered trends in the country’s literature. Kyiv became a place of privilege in the poetry of Zerov and Rylskyi. For this creative community the city was still the cultural capital, and the revanchist divestiture of the city’s capital status was perceived as an act of victors’ revenge. The literary life itself appears to be an invariant of the inner emigration of neoclassics. The addressee of their texts was imagined as a privileged reader, which also meant resistance to dominant concepts of mass, proletarian art.