AntoshkaАнтошка

Generations of Soviet and Russian children have laughed at Antoshka, and the joke still lands. The others keep calling him out to work — Antoshka, Antoshka, let’s go dig potatoes! — and he keeps slipping the summons with the perfect schoolboy’s excuse: we haven’t covered that, it wasn’t set for us. The catch, of course, is that when a giant spoon comes out and it is time to eat, Antoshka is first in line. It is a warm, knowing little portrait of every child who is tireless at play and mysteriously exhausted by chores.

The song comes from Soviet animation. It featured in 1969 in the very first issue of Vesyolaya Karusel (“Merry-Go-Round”), an anthology of short cartoons from the Soyuzmultfilm studio, in a segment directed by Leonid Nosyrev. Nosyrev recalled wanting Antoshka to be red-haired and sunny, “sitting somewhere in nature under a sunflower” — an image he traced to a sunflower he had tried to bend as a child. The Russian Wikipedia article on the film credits the music to Vladimir Shainsky and the words to Yuri Entin, and names Margarita Korabelnikova as Antoshka’s singing voice. The nonsense refrain — tili-tili, trali-vali — is half the fun, a lazy sing-song lilt that fits its hero perfectly.