Headcannon versus headcannon! Believe what you want, of course! But you asked WHY so here is my headcannon.
For Feliks--I don't need to tell you-- but many poles refused to learn Russian. I feel he'd be one of them! As you said, he's stubborn! He also likes to 'play dumb' in cannon and well that seems to hide his more intelligent side. In turn, for me he doesn't seem the type to give in and learn another language when he can just speak his own. Feliks seems like he'd be frustrating in the sense he'd just laugh and be like "Lol I guess I'm dumb! Too bad!" so he'd be more likely to willingly be considered illiterate than learn to properly construct Russian sentences.
I imagine Finland was like this too, but he would be more likely to learn the language as you can't really get by speaking Finnish instead of Russian, but you can with polish!
Many Lithuanians refused as well. Its my personal head cannon that even my OTP Rusliet, Lithuania doesn't speak fluent Russian. In fact, he'd be exactly the same because he would know Polish very well and attempt to use it instead of Russian. So both of them would make shortcuts in this way. >>
So there is my second point, I was making a reference to a saying in Russian I learned in class; "I can understand Polish, but I can not speak it."
It applies to all of the Slavic languages as well, which is why I mentioned even Ivan's sisters there! Which would be far more likely, as characters, to learn Russian willingly considering they are close family.
So essentially that was the concept! That there is a difference between understand and speak. No matter how much Russian I learn, and can understand, I am really really terrible at making sentences and so I would repeat this saying a lot. >3>
LASTLY it is a head-cannon that since all the comics are in a single language for the reader to understand, that the nations have a sort of tower-of-babel language.
I hope that helps bring light on to where I was coming from. ♥
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