I Speak. Deserter of Sleep

“Sleep’s Deserter” is the most complete collection of poems and song lyrics by the leader of “Night Snipers” Diana Arbenina. We’re used to talking about her as a musician, but today Arbenina is not only music—she is also poetry.

She lives in it, suffers in it, swims in it. That’s how the book “Sleep’s Deserter” came to be: besides poems and lyrics, it also includes her vivid artwork and a little prose.

From almost the very founding of “Night Snipers,” Diana Arbenina came up with separating her own creativity into “songs” and “anti-songs.” She herself decides what label to give each piece, but all of them have a clearly defined connection to music—at least in the existing tempo-rhythm.

Arbenina’s poetry is very feminine. It’s as sensuous as it is restrained in form. After all, only a woman, through a personalized love message, can tell about the foundations of existence—while also explaining a couple of philosophical problems, revealing new laws, and elegantly illustrating old ones. And the impulse can be both “yes” and “no,” both presence and absence—an unsaid word, an unmeeting, non-love.

Diana Arbenina is a musician, poet, and leader of the group “Night Snipers.” Behind her are fourteen years of “sniperism” and more than ten albums. In 2004, Diana became a laureate of the youth award “Triumph” for “achievements in literature and art.” The book “Sleep’s Deserter” includes poems from different years, most of which are published for the first time; the texts of her songs, as well as her artwork.

With kind permission from AST, we publish an excerpt from “Sleep’s Deserter” especially for Etoday:

“…She sits in a cafe, chats, laughs, drinks coffee. Suddenly a quick glance somewhere to the side—she catches it. A sharp: ‘Paper!’—a second of frantic searching for paper. And something is found—maybe a napkin, maybe the back side of a menu. And the conversation continues at the same pace—nobody lowers their voices— life doesn’t bother her. …It was born. The first run-through reading, the question that wasn’t asked: ‘So how?!’ Don’t lose this sheet of paper. And then we keep going, so the conversation keeps murmuring on. 15 minutes and parallel spaces with different flows of time: for everyone it goes its own way, but for her it has frozen… What happened in those 15 minutes of the astral—how many years she lost or, on the contrary, gained—no one knows.”